About Conversation Mile

Conversation Mile is a daily speaking routine for adults teaching themselves Spanish, French or German. Every page ends in something to say out loud. The time you spend speaking is what this site counts.

It's for English speakers starting from zero, or from a little school knowledge, up to roughly the middle of the scale. It also fits someone with a tutor who wants to get more out of each lesson, or someone who took a course once and wants to keep going alone.

What you'll find here

Pages on pronunciation, words, grammar and listening, each written as practice you can say today. Each language page points out where English speakers tend to get stuck, when a source says so. There are also five free tools: a 90-day planner, minimal pairs, a verb lookup, a CEFR self-check and the Mile Log. Each one works without signing up, and none of them sends what you type anywhere.

The site doesn't compare apps or courses, prepare anyone for exams, or promise that a language takes a set number of weeks. It doesn't cover teaching English or children learning languages either.

There's no affiliate link or ad anywhere on Conversation Mile, and nothing is for sale.

What this site hasn't done

This site has never taught a student. Nobody here has run these routines with real learners, so no page can tell you how well they work. When you read These minutes and counts are this site's choices, untested with learners, take it at face value.

That's why you won't find success stories or "results in 30 days." Examples start with "Say you're…" because they're hypothetical.

What the site believes

A language counts when you say it. That's the editorial view behind every page, not a research finding.

So the routines here get you speaking in the first week, even if it's only a few words. If you'd rather listen for a few weeks first, that's a reasonable choice too. The site records minutes spent speaking rather than days in a row, though minutes say nothing about level.

Grammar comes as sentences to say, although some tables, such as verb endings and German cases, still have to be learned, and the pages show ways to do it. Early on, less is better, and each plan says what to leave for later. Where a usage depends on region or on how formal the situation is, the page says so, instead of treating one version as the only correct one.

A tutor or a language exchange partner, someone who hears you, comes before any course in this site's view. A recorded course can give you an order to follow. It can't listen to you.

Words this site made up

Three terms are this site's own. Each has a page.

• Spoken Minute. A minute on the timer while you're making sounds in the language. Conversations count half. The full rules are on the shadowing page.
• Mile. Twenty Spoken Minutes. It's a record of what you said, not a level. See the Mile Log.
• Cold Say-Back. Saying a sentence or rule aloud at least a night later, with nothing in front of you, before you check it. See how to memorize vocabulary.

How language facts are checked

A wrong rule or a wrong sound gets learned as if it were right, so each language fact on a page needs a source that page names.

Grammar and pronunciation come from open textbooks whose licenses allow reuse, such as ¿Cómo suena? for Spanish sounds, FREN 140 and Français interactif for French, and Deutsch im Blick and Grimm Grammar for German. Each page lists the ones it used. A source whose terms don't allow reuse is only used to double-check a fact, and is restated in this site's own words. If no source can be found, the fact is left out or narrowed until one is.

Example sentences come from Tatoeba, an open sentence collection, wherever possible. Each one has a number you can look up there, and the people who wrote it and its English version are credited under Sentence credits.

When the collection has nothing clean enough, a sentence may come from an open textbook, with its source. As a last resort, this site writes a short sentence to show a contrast. It's labeled Built by this site to show the contrast, and the rule behind it has a source. Such sentences make up no more than three in ten of a page's examples.

Pronunciation symbols, verb tables and word lists come from Wiktionary, through the Wiktextract project, and from counts this site makes from Tatoeba. Where a pronunciation follows a textbook instead, the page says so. The word lists, the minimal pairs and the verb tables can all be downloaded with their sources and licenses. The word list page writes out every counting rule, and the notes on the verb tables give the source versions and what this site changed, so the files can be checked against where they came from.

The English trap card near the top of a page says how English speakers tend to go wrong. It appears only when a source says so. With no source, the card isn't there.

Two labels sort everything else. Under What this rests on, each step is marked one of two ways.

• Checked against marks a step backed by one of the sources at the foot of the page.
• House routine marks a choice this site made. Five, ten or twenty Spoken Minutes a day, the 90-day plan length, the first conversation on day 30 and the number of days before a sentence leaves your list are all House routines. None of them is a research result, and none predicts what you'll be able to do by a certain day.

A program checks that example sentences match the registry word for word, that tables were copied correctly and that the planner's dates add up. It can't tell whether the language is right, which is why reports from readers matter.

If you speak one of these languages

Corrections from native speakers and teachers are especially welcome. Tell the site where you're from and which variety you speak. A Spanish speaker from Mexico and one from Spain may both be right about different things, and a page can say both.

Email contact@conversationmile.com with the page and the sentence in question. More on what helps is on the contact page, and accepted changes appear on the corrections page.

Reuse and licenses

The diagrams on this site may be reused under CC BY 4.0. Tables and files built from Wiktionary data are under CC BY-SA 4.0, like the data itself. The credit line under each item gives its terms.