Say and Tell and Talk and Speak

What a nightmare these words can be. I have often had existential crisis about teaching after realizing the profound confusion at such a basic level of the language. I mean, we haven’t even come to the truly complicated structures and irrational phrasing that exist in English. Plus, there is an entire ocean of language waiting to be discovered and great adventures to be experienced. But instead we have to sit inside this 2x4m closet-like room and review that it is incorrect to use ‘to’ after ‘tell’.

One day I said, ‘Enough is enough’. (I like that word, ‘enough’. We pronounce it with an ‘f’ at the end. It has an informal spelling ‘enuff’ because that is the way it sounds. It is the word we use to cut through confusion and hesitation, to end the futility and start on a new path.) So, I wanted to make the idea really clear to remedy the problem. And this is the remedy I came up with for myself and for my students. These guidelines should help simplify use and limit confusion.

 


1) Use ‘talk’ instead of ‘speak’. It is true that we use ‘speak’. But I find when students are given so many choices it can be difficult to choose the correct word in the moment. And the truth is we use ‘talk’ at a much higher frequency than ‘speak’. We only really need ‘speak’ for the phrase: “I speak English.” You don’t need to use it any other way (there might be examples but nothing urgent comes to mind).


2) Focus on prepositions and to learn ‘talk to’ to identify the other person in the conversation, instead of ‘talk with’. The second option (‘talk with’) is not incorrect but again we use ‘talk to’ automatically and ‘talk with’ is secondary and not necessary. ‘Talk about’ is used for the topic of the conversation.

  • “I talked to my mother last night about our plans to visit”

3) Use ‘say’ and ‘tell’ when talking about specific details of a conversation. Use ‘talk’ when identifying that a conversation happened.

  • “I talked to the project manager after the meeting.”
  • “Oh, yeah? And what did he say?”
  • “He told me not to worry about the deadlines. He said they were only estimates and more time would be given if needed.”

4) ‘Say’ focuses more on ‘what was said’ and ‘tell’ focuses more on ‘to who’. Looking at the word order and preposition use can give us clues to these points.

Say something (usually a subject-verb phrase or a noun) =

  • He said he was tired.
  • He said a lot of things.

Tell someone + subject-verb phrase or ‘about’ + noun =

  • He told me he was tired.
  • He told me about the news.

5) Adapt your word to fit your idea (Re: Focus on prepositions). If you realize you are using ‘say me’, you should use ‘tell me’, but only in the case that ‘me’ is important to your idea. If ‘me’ isn’t important then you should use ‘say’.

  • He said me the answer to the question. – INCORRECT
  • He told me the answer to the question. – GOOD when the message was directed to you
  • He said the answer to the question. – GOOD when the message was not specifically directed to you.

Be careful! ‘He said to me that he was tired’ or ‘He said a lot of things to me’ are not necessary even though they are correct. But again, students need to learn how to use these words in their distinct forms before they learn to use them flexibly. The same with ‘speak’, I think you should put limitations on these words in order to learn them correctly.


6) Learn the past forms well and don’t confuse them. ‘Told’ looks very similar to ‘talk’ and an unclear idea about past forms might confuse ‘told’ as the past form of ‘talk’. One of my students always said things like ‘He told about his plans’. They must stop here and choose between ‘He talked about his plans.’ or ‘He told me about his plans’. They must also revise their past forms.

‘Talk’ is a regular verb so the past simple and past participle are the same:

  • Talk – Talked – Talked

‘Say’ and ‘tell’ are irregular but use the same form for both also:

  • Say – Said – Said
  • Tell – Told – Told

For further reference, ‘speak’ is also an irregular verb but it has three forms:

  • Speak – Spoke – Spoken

But please limit your use of ‘speak’ to ‘the man spoke french’, for example, until you have a good understanding and track record of using ‘talk’ correctly.


It is not easy for teachers to teach this or for students to learn this so we need to have patience and put our attention on the main points of distinction. Remember, that it is better to be consistent and limited than too flexible and confused when learning to use these words well. Now, we will have to repeat this process with the other sense verbs ‘see, look, watch’ and ‘hear, listen’. (The latter has gotten me and my Spanish-speaking wife into a few good arguments.) We will see those soon. In the meantime I hope this helps clear up your use and understanding of talk, say, tell, …. and forget about speak.

 

 

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