Practice conversations on Linguin now take a task: use these words, find out the secret, get to know them. They exist because of one belief, and the belief came before the feature.
Nothing really goes into your head until it comes out of your mouth. Reading a word does not do it, and neither does picking it out of a list of four. You have to say it to somebody before you have finished working out how.
Cheat chat
There is a kind of language practice where the machine does the language for you.
You know it when you are in it. You type a sentence in English and it comes back translated. You start a word and it finishes it. You say something half wrong and it answers as if you had said it right, then tells you how well you are doing. At the end you have a long transcript in a language you still cannot speak.
That is cheat chat. The trouble with it is that it feels exactly like work. It costs you nothing and it flatters you the whole way through, so on a tired evening it is the thing you will pick.
An open practice conversation is a softer version of the same trap. Nobody is helping you cheat. You cheat yourself, because you choose every sentence and so you choose the easy one. You say where you are from, you order the coffee, you say it was fine, thanks. Ten minutes of your language, all of it from the shelf you can already reach.
What using it actually means
Pulling a word out of your own head, in real time, and putting it in front of someone who is going to answer.
That is the whole of it. The hard part is the pulling. A word you can recognise on a card is not yet a word you own, and the gap between the two is only ever closed one way, by needing it and reaching for it and getting there a beat too slow, over and over, until you are not slow anymore.
A task cannot say the sentence for you, which is the only reason it helps.
So the tasks do not make talking easier. They make the conversation ask you for something you would not have said on your own.
Use these words
You bring a list and the conversation walks you into it.
The words sit as chips on the setup screen. Type one and add it, paste several separated by commas, tap one to switch it off without losing it. You can keep thirty per language. The list stays in your browser between talks, one for each language you practise.
Tap Suggest and, if you are signed in and have saved anything in that language, the first fill comes from your own dictionary: the last dozen words you saved while looking things up. That is the loop worth having. You look up quedar on Tuesday because someone used it on you, you save it, and on Friday it is on the table before a talk. Tap Suggest again and you get ten fresh picks for your level and for the scene you asked for.
Then the list rides at the top of the screen while you talk. Words tick off as you use them, in any form, and the character steers toward the ones still open without ever naming them. You get asked about your weekend and there is suddenly a good reason to say madrugar. You get offered a second coffee and sobremesa is right there.
The review splits the list in two, Used and Missed. Nine of ten is a good talk. The one under Missed is the word that beat you, and it is the one to keep for next time.
Find out the secret
The character is holding something back and you get it out of them by talking.
One line sits at the top of the screen, something like "Why is Marta closing the shop early today?" The answer is built around that person, out of who they are and what they want in this scene, so it is different every time. It is never dark and never awkward to say out loud. It is a small human thing with an ordinary reason to keep quiet: pride, tact, a surprise for someone, a rule they are bending.
Three to five clues sit behind that line and they come out one at a time, through normal conversation only. Ask about her day, her family, what she is doing tonight, and pieces arrive. Ask the question word for word and you get brushed off, politely, with an answer to something smaller.
This one makes you do two things a learner almost never practises. You have to ask, which means building questions instead of answering them. And you have to say what you think is true and risk being wrong out loud, which is most of what talking to strangers is.
The clues start dashed, Clue 1, Clue 2, and fill in as you find them. When they are all out, the line under them tells you to say what you think the answer is. Say it. If you are right the character tells you so plainly, a green note appears in the chat, and the review ends with the answer written out. If you never get there, the review tells you anyway.
Get to know them
Six to eight things about the person, as short checklist lines. Eye colour. Where they grew up. What they did yesterday. A food they cannot stand.
The answers are fixed before the talk starts, so the person stays the same person the whole way through. They will not offer any of it. Every line ticks off when you ask the question that gets it.
Then it does the thing I like most. Once you have found everything out, they ask you to tell it back. All of it, in one go. Ten minutes of one-line answers turn into the longest stretch you have spoken in that language all day, and there is no way to fake it, because you are the only one in the conversation who knows what you found out.
Setting one up
Open practice conversations. Pick your language and level, pick talk to speak or chat to type, then open Task and choose. Words keeps its editor open underneath, so you can build the list before you start. Below it, write a line about what the conversation should be about, or leave it empty and a scene gets drawn for you.
Tasks work the same in both modes. Anything you can do with your voice you can do by typing, on a day when you cannot talk out loud.
The secret was the hard part
Words and get to know them worked the first time I played them. The secret needed four rounds in a day.
The first version made the secret the errand of the scene itself. A driver taking me to the airport was hiding why he wanted to get to the airport, which is not a secret, it is the ride. The first clue was the question again in his own words. And when I asked him straight out, he told me, which is cheat chat wearing a mystery. Now the secret has to live outside the scene's business, in the character's own day or family or plans, and it has to survive being asked word for word.
Round two: every clue out, and I had no idea what to do next. That is where the what-to-do line under the chips came from.
Round three: I solved it and could not tell that I had. The character said "you worked it out" and named nothing, so winning landed like small talk. Now the answer is spelled out, in your own language, the moment you get there.
Round four solved cleanly and turned up the next problem. Two secrets in a row were a birthday present, which is the first idea anyone has. Birthdays and parties and gifts are out now, unless your own scene puts them there.
That is where it stands. Two of the three are steady, and I am still watching the secret across scenes.
Nobody can do this part for you
Free talk is still there and still the right choice on a day when you only want to speak. But an app that makes speaking easy is doing you a favour you did not want.
Start a conversation, set a task before you press Start, and let it be a little bit hard.