How can I practise speaking if I have nobody to talk to?

You can do a surprising amount alone, though I will be honest with you at the end about the limits. **Narrate your day, out loud.** What you are doing, what you are about to do. It feels ridiculous for about three days and then it becomes the single most useful habit you have. **Shadowing.** Play a short clip of natural speech and speak along with it, a half-second behind, copying the rhythm and intonation rather than just the words. Ten minutes a day does more for your accent and fluency than an hour of grammar. **Record yourself.** Speak for two minutes on a topic, listen back. It is uncomfortable and it is the fastest way to hear your own patterns. **Read aloud**, but choose dialogue rather than prose — you want the rhythms of speech, not of writing. **Rehearse the conversations you will actually have.** Ordering food, introducing yourself, explaining your job. Fluency is largely a matter of having been here before. The honest limit: none of this gives you the thing that makes speaking hard, which is *unpredictability* — a real person saying something you did not expect and having to respond in real time. That has to come from a conversation partner or a teacher eventually. But the work above means that when you get one, you use that time far better.

Stuart

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