What happens if you speak for 10 minutes a day for 30 days

What would happen to your speaking if, every day for the next 30 days, you spent just 10 minutes actually speaking your target language? To be clear, I don't mean studying grammar or vocabulary or reading. None of that. Literally just speaking.

I'm James. I'm a native English speaker, I speak Spanish and Italian, and I have 13 years of language learning experience.

The problem with most language learning

It's so easy to spend hours, months and years doing things that aren't practising conversations. It's not practising coming up with the words and pronouncing them. You can use apps, watch content and learn vocabulary, and still freeze when speaking with native speakers.

As you'll know, having conversations is a different skill to absorbing content, watching Netflix or doing grammar exercises. And it's surprising how far you get with conversation practice if you only spend 10 minutes a day on it.

What 10 minutes of practice looks like

I recorded myself doing it, using Voco, the conversation practice platform I built. I did it in Spanish, but it also works for Italian, German, French and Portuguese.

The conversation partner opened by asking me about my Erasmus year in Spain, in Spanish, with an English translation underneath. Here's what you notice when you actually do it:

• You repeat yourself and make mistakes. I said a word in Italian by mistake, then corrected myself, because the two languages are so similar. That's the problem I had when speaking Italian, too.
• You can turn the full English off and keep only keywords. The most important words for that sentence are highlighted. If you look at the keywords alone, you can tell roughly what's going on. That's what happens when you speak with natives. You don't understand everything, but based on the context you listen for the words you do know and piece it together.
• You can pause and think. I paused while working out what to say, and there's a list of suggested responses if you're stuck.
• It understands you even when you're only 50% there. I said a lot of grammatical errors, couldn't think of some words, and found a way around them. The platform still understood what I meant and replied. Sometimes its idea of what I meant is slightly off, but you can practise anyway.
• It learns about you over time. After the session it shows what it remembered from before and what it learned this time, and you can edit or delete anything that's inaccurate.

You'll always make mistakes. The point is how you get past the mistake or the mental block and keep the conversation going.

Why it works

That was 10 minutes. If you do that over 30 days, you can massively increase your ability to communicate with natives in conversation.

Ten minutes times 30 days is 300 minutes. That's 5 hours of understanding what's being said to you, thinking of a response, finding the words, assembling them and saying them. It also means getting stuck, not knowing a word, thinking of other words and other ways of saying it, and still getting your meaning across without being 100% perfect.

You stop freezing up as much because you're used to coming up with words and phrases. You're used to the pronunciation, even if it isn't perfect. You're saying it on repeat and your mind gets used to repetitions.

You don't need to overcomplicate it. If you can find 10 minutes a day, you can open it on your phone while sitting in your lounge. That's it.