Memorizing Words Is the Least Useful Way to Learn to Speak, So I Built an App

You can memorize words and still not say a sentence

I’ve always thought that if the goal is to speak English, memorizing vocabulary is the least efficient, most boring and least useful way to learn.

You stare at a word and memorize its meaning. You forget it, memorize it again, forget it again. After all that time the words all look familiar, but when you actually need to say a sentence, it still won’t come out.

To me, the most efficient, most alive and most useful way is to make a foreign friend and talk with them every day.

You have things you want to share, questions you want to ask, and you want to respond to what they say. Words and sentences get used in one exchange after another, and everything you learn is useful right away.

A whole paragraph in your head, and all that comes out is “Good”

But that is exactly where the problem is. To practise speaking by chatting, you first have to be able to chat.

Say you find a foreign friend on HelloTalk. They ask how your weekend was, and of course you have something to say: you tried a new restaurant, queued for ages, and it turned out worse than the place downstairs.

In your own language, you could say all of that without thinking. In English, you have to search for the words, work out the order, figure out how to express that exact meaning. There’s a whole paragraph in your head, and what finally comes out of your mouth is one word: “Good”.

The place you get stuck is this: you know what you want to say, but you can’t put it into English and say it.

I built Unscript to help people get across that step.

The prompts shrink, and the part you say yourself grows

The idea is to start you with a complete everyday dialogue and have you say the expressions in it, out loud, until they’re second nature. The app says the other person’s lines; you say yours. Back and forth, one line at a time.

At first you can read your full lines off the screen. Once you’re familiar with them, half of the key words are blanked out and you recall them yourself. Later, only the first letters are left. Finally, your English lines are hidden entirely: you listen to the other person and reply.

The prompts shrink a little at a time, and the part you organize, recall and say yourself grows a little at a time.

A fixed dialogue gives you a starting point. When you can’t build the sentence yet, you can still start speaking. Stuck? Look at the hint. Said it badly? Do it again. Then slowly work up to saying it with nothing to look at.

What I hope people build up is a set of expressions they’ve said out loud, said until they’re fluent, and can pull out when they need them. So that when they’re really chatting with a foreign friend and there’s something they want to say, their mouth can keep up with their head.

That’s what Unscript, which means “off the script”, is trying to do.