Should I ever practice speaking? When?

Definitely! We recommend doing so once you get to level 6 in the language learning roadmap. Optionally, you can start already at level 5 if you are not too concerned about your pronunciation being spot-on. Speaking is a lot less important than people think, and the amount you need to practice is a lot less than usually believed, but it’s still necessary to achieve a couple of things:\n\nLearning to use the muscles in your mouth to produce the sounds of the language. This will help you build the muscle memory that’s necessary for you to be able to pronounce words accurately and at a normal pace. It’s better to do this once your knowledge of the sounds of the language is good enough that you can tell whether the sounds coming out of your mouth match the way they sound in your head. The kind of muscle memory learning you are doing in this step is similar to learning to spin a pen, riding a bike, or bouncing a basketball. That is to say, it only takes a few hours to learn, not months or years.\n\nGaining confidence by having positive experiences communicating in the language. Having positive experiences talking to people will help you gain confidence in your ability to hold a conversation. That will help you go less into your head, let the language you have acquired come out unencumbered, and speak more fluently without second-guessing yourself. And you will get mostly positive experiences if your level is high enough.\n\nSpeaking is also a way to get speakers of the language to talk back to us and provide us with more input. This kind of input is especially valuable because it’s relevant to us, to our life and to our relationships. We also pay a lot of attention because the other person expects us to. If you live in a country where the language is spoken, you can start to speak a bit earlier in order to benefit from this additional input. If you do so, we recommend that you ask short questions and try to prompt people to talk to you for a long time, while avoid pushing yourself to use grammar or vocabulary above your level.\nBesides that, there are of course practical benefits to speaking if you live in the country, and we wouldn’t dream of telling you to not speak the language if you need it to get a job, find a place to stay, or buy food for your children. You can also check out our video “When to start speaking”: