The 2-Minute Speaking Practice: Recording Myself to Stop Saying “Like” All the Time

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I’m a Chinese teacher and a lifelong language learner. I enjoy testing different ways to learn a language, both to understand my own learning better and to help my students.

I was hesitant to start learning French, but the 2-minute speaking practice from the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp helped me get moving and build confidence.

Emily is my student. She enjoys challenging herself with Chinese, whether she’s practising the pronunciation of a character or correcting her grammar. To help her cut down on English filler words and what she called Chinglish, I encouraged her to try the 2-minute speaking practice.

We had fun practising together as teacher and student, as well as friends supporting and encouraging each other.

This is our story.

A note from the Fluent in 3 Months team before we get started: You can chat away in Chinese for at least 15 minutes with the “Fluent in 3 Months” method. All it takes is 90 days. Tap this link to find out more.

Struggles

Emily: “I Was Trapped by Chinglish”

My parents sent me to a Chinese immersion school when I was just 2. When I first started learning Chinese, I felt forced to do it. “Why couldn’t I just learn English?” I wondered. It felt difficult, and I had no confidence in myself.

But after a few years, I got used to it and slowly began enjoying it and gaining more confidence in my ability to speak Chinese.

However, there were errors that I kept repeating and didn’t know how to correct. When I couldn’t think of a simple Chinese word, I fell back on English because I felt dumb for not knowing an easy expression. I also couldn’t stop using “like” as a filler word.

At the time, I felt hopeless. “I tried,” I would say. “Why can’t I just give up?” Eventually, I realised that I had to practise and pay more attention to what I was saying.

TY: “French Felt Impossible Until I Knew What I Wanted to Say”

Many parts of French had frightened me for a long time, especially listening and conjugations. I didn’t know where to start, but I knew that structured, textbook-based courses didn’t feel engaging enough for me.

My confusion turned into anxiety that I wasn’t making any progress, until one day I worked out my two main motivations for learning French.

First, I wanted to communicate with my in-laws, who spoke very little English. Second, I simply enjoy exploring what works for me in language learning.

That gave me a clear experiment: practise speaking French, pay attention to what felt fast and intuitive, and keep track of my progress.

Once I knew that, the fog cleared.

Why Did We Start This 2-Minute Speaking Practice?

Shannon, a coach from the Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp, encouraged each participant to add a short speaking exercise alongside the 15-minute conversation goal in our target language.

This is how we were advised to go about it:

• Choose a topic.
• Prepare for 1 minute.
• Turn on the camera.
• Record yourself speaking for 2 minutes.
• No pause, no redo.

The time limit adds some of the pressure of a real conversation, while the recording gives you something concrete to review afterwards.

For a wider look at practising speaking, this video covers several ways to make it part of your routine:

Quick Response

With only 1 minute to prepare, you’ll improvise through most of the recording. You have to respond to the topic, organise your thoughts and find the words you need without scripting every sentence.

When You Don’t Know a Word…

You can look up words during the preparation stage, but once you press record, you’re on your own.

Running out of words is normal. The exercise gives you practice describing the missing word with simpler language you already know.

It’s the same skill you use while travelling: combine the vocabulary you have with gestures and keep going until you’re understood.

Getting Unstuck and Building Confidence

The camera stays on for 2 minutes, without pausing or starting again.

That means watching yourself get stuck in the middle of a sentence, speaking your way out of it, and gradually getting more comfortable thinking and talking at the same time.

Real conversations don’t have a redo button either.

Recording also gives you a chance to notice what went well, what you could improve and how much progress you’ve already made.

For this project, I recorded 45 practice videos and posted them in my YouTube playlist.

How Did It Go?

Phase 1: Fun Yet Terrifying

Topics

If, like me, you’ve worked through the basics of pronunciation and know how to conjugate a regular verb in the present tense, this stage can be fun and terrifying.

I didn’t feel confident talking about my day because too much happened for the vocabulary and grammar I had. I would need to describe emotions, decisions and all sorts of small events.

So I spent the first 2 weeks talking about my favourite colours and animals, my hometown, and the countries I had visited.

I chose topics built around familiar words that didn’t require complicated grammar or sentence structures.

Preparation

Sixty seconds goes by quickly. One day I managed to compose only two sentences; another day I got stuck trying to remember “you are” (vous êtes), which can address several people or one person formally.

What helped most was taking a few deep breaths, then jotting down several nouns or verbs as prompts. If I had time, I prepared the first line too, even if that polished opening made the pauses afterwards sound clumsy by comparison.

Even thinking about preparing for the practice felt like torture.

Before quitting, I asked myself why I felt so uneasy. I realised that I wanted the certainty of exact sentences, rather than a few words flickering through my mind.

I was also afraid that I wouldn’t make any progress compared with the day before.

My solution was to prepare an opening and a closing line, inspired by a script from Bootcamp Mini Challenge #1.

In all 45 videos, I used the informal opening “Coucou tout le monde, c’est ma première/deuxième/… vidéo.” (“Hi everyone, this is my first/second/… video.”) For each recording, I changed the blank to the corresponding ordinal.

At least that opening line became fluent.

Takeaways

1. Pausing isn’t failure. I noticed that I often used “um” in Chinese, my mother tongue, and in English. In French, I often used euh (“um”). I also stretched et… (“and…”) while searching for the next idea; it is still the conjunction “and,” not another word for “um.”
2. Staying on camera for the full 2 minutes built my confidence. Before this practice, I would stop after saying “Bonjour, je m’appelle TY et je suis chinoise. J’habite en Chine.” (“Hi, my name is TY and I am Chinese. I live in China.”) Here, lowercase chinoise is the feminine nationality adjective; a male speaker would say chinois. The time limit pushed me beyond those familiar lines. Even when I repeated “I like dogs” 10 times, finishing the recording made me wonder whether I could manage 5 more seconds the next day, or add that I didn’t like snakes.
3. Recording myself for 5 days in a row helped me build a habit. Once I had a one-week streak, carrying it into the next week felt much easier.

I loved this stage because the practice helped me understand my own reactions. Fluency stopped feeling like the only priority, and finishing each recording gave me a small bit of happiness that made my day.

Phase 2: Finding Momentum

I didn’t exactly choose to move to phase 2. I ran out of simple daily topics, and talking about my day no longer felt stimulating. Fluent in 3 Months Bootcamp Mini Challenge #2 arrived at the right time: I had to collect useful building blocks, such as patterns and expressions, then make my own sentences with them.

Topic

I paraphrased a French story I had listened to and tried to use the building blocks I’d noted from it. My main focus was the French conditional, so I paid particular attention to using it in the video.

Preparation

Keeping the story structure in mind eased my anxiety about not knowing what to say. I used most of my preparation time to organise the storyline and review how the building blocks fitted into context.

Later, I grouped the story around the key building blocks. That way I could skip part of the plot without losing my main goal of using those expressions.

Two things helped most:

1. Knowing what I wanted to say quieted the fear that I would make so many mistakes nobody could understand me. As my ideas became more complicated, I must have made thousands of mistakes, but I was too busy finding the next sentence to dwell on them. Questions about the past tense, en or à, and whether a word was feminine or masculine came and went quickly.
2. One goal at a time kept the practice manageable. My focus was the French conditional, so I tried not to blame myself for mistakes with the future or another form. An almost-correct conditional sentence was still worth celebrating!

Phase 3: Inviting Others to Join the Practice

When I started to feel bored and stuck, I invited my student Emily to join me. Here’s her story of practising spoken Chinese:

During the first week of my 4-week practice, I still said “like” and used Chinglish out of habit. TY and I discussed it, then decided that I would take 1 minute to prepare and record myself speaking Chinese about my day for 2 minutes.

The first recording felt awkward and took 10 minutes instead of 2. I said “like” only once and didn’t use any English, but the video was long and choppy.

The second video was better. It took 4 minutes rather than 10, and speaking felt easier. I didn’t say “like” or use any Chinglish, which gave me a boost of confidence.

The third video reached the 2-minute goal without “like” or any Chinglish, and the fourth went the same way.

After recording the videos, I felt that my fluency had improved quickly. Speaking slowly helped me focus on what I was saying, which made it easier to avoid “like” and Chinglish.

We made a list of expressions that can help at different moments. They aren’t interchangeable translations of “like”: some buy time, while others introduce an example or connect ideas.

Chinese	Pinyin	Meaning, use and register
我想想	wǒ xiǎngxiang	Conversational: “Let me think.” It buys you a moment.
我想说	wǒ xiǎng shuō	Neutral and conversational: “I want to say…” It usually introduces the thought that follows.
等一下	děng yíxià	A common spoken request: “Wait a moment.”
我忘了怎么说	wǒ wàng le zěnme shuō	Neutral and conversational: “I forgot how to say it.”
该怎么说	gāi zěnme shuō	A conversational self-question: “How should I put it?”
像	xiàng	A neutral way to say “like” when introducing a comparison or example. It needs content after it.
比如说	bǐrú shuō	Common in speech and writing: “For example.”
就	jiù	A neutral, context-dependent adverb. Its meaning comes from the sentence, so it isn’t a generic standalone filler.
就是说	jiùshì shuō	A conversational reformulation: “That is to say” or “I mean.”
嗯	en	A conversational sound that can mark hesitation or a response. Its force changes with intonation.
然后	ránhòu	A neutral connective: “Then” or “and then.” It moves to what happened next.

Tips for Trying the 2-Minute Practice

• Set a clear goal: decide how many recordings you’ll make each week, for how many weeks, and which speaking skill you’ll focus on.
• Record while you still have some energy. If you already find the exercise difficult, don’t leave it until just before sleep.
• Speak slowly enough to form each sentence without rushing.
• Share your daily progress with a partner or group.
• Notice the moments that went well and celebrate your progress.

If you want to keep building your other skills alongside speaking, read our guide to reading, writing, speaking and listening. Here are a few more recommendations.

• How to Learn a Language in 2022 – Ultimate Guide with 35+ Language Hacks
• The Best Way to Learn a Language [Scientifically Proven, Polyglot Tested]
• The 4 Essential Language Skills – and How to Improve Them
• What Language Should I Learn? The Bulletproof Guide
• Magnetic Memory Method: An In-Depth Review from a Language Learner