Practice speaking English

How you practice English on Tokmia

Tokmia runs lives — group voice conversations you can drop into. Every live has a stage and an audience, and you arrive in the audience. You can stay there and just listen for as long as you want; when you are ready, you raise your hand and the host brings you up. A live holds up to eight speakers, so the people who come up actually get a turn.

If a group feels like too much, Practice Now pairs you one-to-one with somebody learning your language while you learn theirs, on a fixed timer with a shared prompt on screen — eight minutes of free conversation, or seven minutes of vocabulary or role play. Neither of you has to invent the first sentence.

English is one of the twelve languages on Tokmia with the learning side fully built out, so words you look up during a conversation and grammar mistakes pulled from the session afterwards go into spaced-repetition decks you can review the next day.

What is actually hard about speaking English

Not the same as what is hard about reading it. These are the things that show up specifically when you have to produce the language in real time:

English is stress-timed, and that changes the vowels

Stressed syllables land at roughly even intervals and everything between them gets compressed. Can becomes kn, to becomes tuh. Speakers of syllable-timed languages often produce every vowel clearly and sound careful but foreign — and, more importantly, struggle to hear reduced speech coming back.

Phrasal verbs are the real vocabulary

Put off, put up with, put down. They are unguessable from their parts, enormously common in speech, and rarer in the written English most learners study from.

Articles, if your language has none

For speakers of Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and many others, a and the carry a distinction their first language marks differently or not at all. Rules help a little; hearing the pattern thousands of times helps more.

What a English live looks like

Hosts name their own lives and set the level, so you can tell before joining whether it is meant for you. Titles look like:

• Casual English — anything goes
• Job interview practice
• English for work: meetings and small talk

Examples of how hosts title lives, not a listing of what is running right now.

Before you start

• Listening counts. Sitting in the audience is a legitimate way to use Tokmia and a lot of people do it for their first week.
• Nobody can message you unless you follow each other back. There is no setting that opens your inbox to strangers — see Safety.
• Nothing is recorded. Voice conversations are never recorded, by us or for us.
• It is free. Joining and hosting lives and the review decks cost nothing, with no minute limit and no ads.

Free when it launches. Other languages