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Why am I having trouble forming sentences?

How can I become more fluent in forming spoken sentences?

  • I've found that I usually have no problem expressing my  thoughts and forming understandable and well thought out sentences if I  actually write them. However, when I try to form a sentence on the fly in a conversation with  someone I always manage to screw it up. I cannot think of a word or I  start to word my sentences the wrong way and they don't flow. I also seem to have a horrible working memory, which  probably causes a lot of my grief. It's not that I have nothing to say, I just don't know how to say it and  by the time I have it correctly thought out it would be pointless to  bring  the topic back up. English is not my mother tongue, and my spoken English improved little over the last 7 years. I sometimes just can't say anything coherent. It is there in my head but I can't put it into words or express myself properly. Also with writing, once I write something, I often have to edit it multiple times before  it's "right". I could write  essays very well, but I took forever to perfect them.  I improved a  bit, but I just can't form thoughts while under pressure.  I can't  really translate what I'm thinking into words right now either.  I'd be interested to here what others have to say  about this. I'm just not sure how to actually combat this issue.I took my time to write this, please offer help if you can.

  • Answer:

    It is quite normal to start a sentence the wrong way and then have to rephrase. We do that a lot in our native language as well - just record yourself have a conversation in your native language and you'll hear it happen a lot. In order to improve fluency, I highly recommend you check out the book "How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately" by Boris Shekhtman. It has tons of tips on how to speak more fluently. I would summarize them here, but the book is already a summary, hard to condense further...

Judith Meyer at Quora Visit the source

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get yourself a high-end voice-to-text software (http://www.nuance.com/dragon/index.htm is great) and use it liberally. This hack should bring your writing and speaking voices into alignment with one another, if you do it often enough. A young Christopher Hitchens had the same problem, only reversed. His writer friends would jokingly refer to him as "the one who can speak but not write". He eventually figured it out, and so can you.

Arad Namin

You should read aloud a lot of grammatically correct content like books. This will help you to get used to what sounds correct when you say it. You may want to join http://www.toastmasters.org to get an objective evaluation from other members where you need to improve. We helped many members at my club to become much better at forming sentences in English.

Leonid S. Knyshov

You are able to formulate well in your native language? Is so, practice your English and further perfect it by listening and watching video's, films, podcast of programs you enjoy, reading books, journals etc. to familiarize you even more with how the language is used by native speakers. When you reach the point that while speaking/writing English you think in English you're (almost) there, not if you're translating all the time.

Liang-Hai Sie

Hi, English is also my second language and I know exactly what you are talking about. Here are some of my opinions. First of all, I have read a question on Quora yesterday about how to improve spoken English in a short time or something like that, and I found the answer extremely useful. To be brief, the idea is to 'shadow' a movie or TV show you like. It means just repeating whatever you heard in the movie. You can refer to that question for more information. Secondly, believe it or not, watching TV shows for a long time really helps. Every time I spent like several hours watching English speaking shows, I just can't help myself but speaking English to others after that, and I actually speak quite fluently at that time. Finally, I think that maybe you are thinking in your native language way when you speak English. Therefore, you are actually translating instead of just talking about the certain idea. And that may affect your fluency in speaking English. Because I did translation a lot before, I just thought this might be one of the reasons. Oops I still have another finally... Finally, try to relax when you are speaking English. Don't put too much pressure on yourself, just consider it as a sharing, or a chance to communicate with others in order to get to know others or let others to understand you. It is fun to explore people and the world, isn't it. Good luck and wish u all the best!

Elsie Wny

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