By 
Brandon Harville Last updated:
Do you feel nervous and forgetful when talking with English speakers?
When I was studying Spanish, basic conversational skills were the hardest thing for me to learn.
Whenever someone asked me a question, I would freeze up and forget how to talk.
When it came time to hold a Spanish conversation, I would suddenly forget everything I studied. That’s when I realized that I had not been practicing my conversational skills.
I spent six years studying the language at high school and college, but I never got the opportunity chat with actual Spanish speakers.
The mistake that a lot of students, including myself, make when learning a foreign language is forgetting to practice real-world conversational skills.
Instead, we spend our time memorizing vocabulary words and doing workbook activities. And while these exercises are also important, they don’t teach us how to speak naturally.
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
What You Need to Hold a Basic English Conversation
Being able to have a basic English conversation isn’t hard—you just need to know how to express yourself and start with brief, simple conversations.
To hold a basic conversation, you need to be able to:
- Introduce yourself and share some personal information.
- Talk about your needs and expectations.
- Make future plans.
- Talk about your career and your educational background.
- Hold simple conversations with people you encounter in day-to-day activities, like shopping, going to the bank or going to the doctor’s office.
For some great insider tips and easy-to-use strategies to develop your English speaking skills, be sure to check out the video below.
English language coach and content creator Cherie talks you through her top 18 tips to advance your speaking skills in English and help you on your path to English fluency.
For more great content and thoughtful mini-English lessons, be sure to subscribe to the FluentU English YouTube channel and don’t forget to hit that notification bell.
Unless the only reason you’re learning English is to read literature, you’re going to have to communicate with English speakers at some point. Whether traveling abroad, working for an international company or going to an English-speaking university.
Before you become a master English conversationalist, you’re going to need to develop some basic English conversational skills to help you speak confidently and not forget your vocabulary in the moment—like I used to do with Spanish.
The best way to build these skills is to take basic English conversation courses. Great for preparing for an upcoming trip to London or New York, these online English courses can teach you how to talk about yourself, ask for help and hold simple conversations with people you’ll encounter throughout a normal day.
Here are some courses that will get you chatting in English in no time.
SKESL
Topics Covered: Small talk, feelings and opinions, day-to-day activities and interests
SKESL’s Beginner Conversation Course is great for ESL students trying to build their basic conversational skills.
The course is filled with helpful content, as well as audio clips of English conversations, dialogues and comprehension quizzes. In fact, it’s probably one of the most comprehensive free courses you’ll come across on the internet.
The course has 10 units, and each unit covers a certain topic and has a total of 20 conversations. The beginner conversation course has 200 conversations in all.
BBC Learning
Topics Covered: Introductions, work-related topics, casual and formal conversations
The BBC’s Learning English Courses aren’t just great for learning how to hold conversations, they’re also perfect for building your vocabulary and improving your grammar.
In terms of conversational English, this English Course for Lower-Intermediate Studentsteaches you how to introduce yourself, ask and answer questions and hold basic conversations with English speakers. It even has a unit that teaches the difference between formal and informal speaking, which is good to know if you ever plan on working or studying in an English-speaking country.
Another good thing about the BBC course is that it comes with videos of people speaking English naturally, as well as transcripts and short activities to test you on what you’ve learned.
FluentU
Topics Covered: Everything
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Click here to check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
The nice thing about learning English with FluentU is how you’re able to study using a variety of resources—they have a huge library of videos and clips to reinforce your learning.
And since everything is arranged by difficulty, as well as topics like culture, business, entertainment, health and more, you can easily find a different conversation every time you study.
Udemy
Topics Covered: Making plans, talking about yourself
Speak English with Confidence is a paid online conversational course by Udemy that teaches you how to hold basic English conversations and improve your pronunciation and listening skills.
The course is divided into a total of nine units, each covering a different topic like introductions, work-related conversations, interests and more. What’s nice about this course is that you’re able to start at the beginner’s level and advance to intermediate conversational English as you complete the course.
Also, Speak English with Confidence is one of the most comprehensive conversational English courses on the internet. It comes with the following resources to help you learn:
- Five hours of educational videos
- 56 articles covering conversational English
- 248 extra resources to help you study
- Interactive exercises and activities
And best of all, after finishing the course, you’re given a certificate of completion that you can use when applying to an English-speaking job or educational program.
TalkEnglish.com
Topics Covered: Using English expressions and casual conversations
TalkEnglish is a free language-learning where students can improve their English skills. Its English Speaking Basics course is for beginner ESL students who want to practice their basic English conversational skills.
Perfect for learners who are just learning how to communicate with English speakers, this course teaches students how to use English expressions that are commonly used in conversations, like:
- “I wanna + (verb)”
- “You seem + (adjective)”
- “I were you, I would + (verb)”
The course is broken up into three sections, each one a little more difficult than the previous section. Every section has a list of expressions that you can click on.
After clicking on an expression, you’ll get an explanation on how to use the expression in conversation, as well as a list of sample sentences and short audio clips of these sentences being spoken by an English speaker.
All Ears English
Topic Covered: Learning English, using expressions and general conversation
All Ears English is a podcast for helping ESL students improve their speaking and listening skills. The podcast is run by three English teachers named Lindsay, Michelle and Jessica, who talk about a number of exciting topics, like important study habits every student should have and how to respond to a funny joke.
One of my favorite episodes is How to Respond to “What Are You Up To?” in English, which teaches you how to respond to this commonly-used greeting by talking about how you’ve been.
What makes All Ears English different from other conversation courses is that the podcast typically covers how to become a better English student. But instead of talking like how a teacher would lecture the class, the podcast takes a conversational approach that uses slang and humor to teach conversational English.
Daily English Conversation
Topics Covered: Day-to-day activities and general conversation topics
Daily English Conversation is a YouTube channel that teaches you the basics of conversational English by having you listen and repeat sentences.
Best for students who have a little extra time to spend studying, the videos on this channel are often more than an hour long. But if you’re someone who enjoys programs that teach English with audio clips, you’ll find this channel to be incredibly useful.
In most videos, you’ll find a conversation between two or more English speakers, as well as a script so you can follow along. There are a number of topics covered in one conversation video, and by clicking “read more” on the video’s description, you can skip to specific topics that you want to listen to.
The Daily English Conversation videos include a mixture of basic and more advanced English conversation topics, making it a great resource for students of all levels.
And if you’re looking for a couple of good videos to start out with, take a look at Learn English Conversation for Beginners: Basic Englishand Most Common Questions.
With the help of these basic English conversation courses, you’ll never have to worry about freezing up in a conversation again.
After a little bit of practice, you’ll start to feel more confident about your speaking skills and holding English conversations will start to feel natural to you.
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
Do you wish you had a better way to learn new English phrases?
Try FluentU!.
Our language learning program is designed to teach you English phrases the natural way—using authentic videos like TV clips, movie trailers and music videos.
Every FluentU video comes with interactive subtitles. Just click or tap on any unfamiliar word or phrase in the captions to get an instant definition, example sentences and native pronunciation audio.
You can search the FluentU video library for any words or phrases to instantly find authentic English videos that use them. Videos can be sorted by subject, format and difficulty level, so you can discover phrases that fit your learning needs and interests.
FluentU comes with built-in learning tools like vocabulary lists and personalized quizzes. There are also multimedia flashcards with video clips, audio and images to help you remember words.
You can access FluentU on your browser or by downloading the iOS or Android app.
By combining engaging clips with tools to help you understand them, you'll remember the context phrases are used in and the terms will stick better in your mind.
