Most people learning English are not starting from zero. They have years of school grammar, a large passive vocabulary, and almost no experience of using it in real time with somebody who might not wait. The gap sits between knowing a sentence and getting it out before the moment passes.
The tense that trips up speakers of almost every other language, corrected without stopping the conversation.
A, the, or nothing at all. If your first language has no articles, this never becomes intuitive from rules, only from hearing thousands of correct examples and being corrected on your own sentences.
Put off, put up with, put out, put down. The verb is easy and the little word after it changes everything. They are the single biggest gap between formal written English and how people actually speak.
English squashes unstressed syllables. Give every word equal weight and you can be perfectly correct and still hard to follow. Getting the stress right does more for your clarity than any individual sound.
Most learners know more English than they can use in real time.
Repair phrases. They are what keeps a conversation going when you have lost the thread, and they are the difference between speaking and going quiet.
| Say this | When |
|---|---|
| Sorry, could you say that again? | Direct, polite, and completely ordinary. Nobody minds. |
| What is the word for...? | You are missing one word. Describe it and let the other person supply it. |
| I am not sure I follow. | Clearer than "I do not understand", and it invites them to rephrase rather than repeat. |
| Let me put that another way. | Buys you a second attempt at your own sentence, which is a very natural thing to do. |
| Kind of, yeah. | Softens an answer. Real speech is full of hedges, and using them makes you sound at ease. |
The sentence you said, the more natural version, and a one-line reason, without the conversation stopping to grade you.
Open in Hindi, Spanish, Arabic or Portuguese and get carried across into English gradually, instead of freezing on the first sentence.
Every fix is kept per language, so the pattern you keep repeating becomes visible instead of invisible.
A General American accent. British, Indian, Nigerian, Australian and every other English is understood in what you say, and none of it gets corrected into American English. The goal is being understood, not sounding like one country.
It is speaking practice, not an exam course. It will make you more fluent and more comfortable talking, which is what most people lose marks on, but it does not teach the format or mark you against a band descriptor.
Start in your own language. Say the first sentence in Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, whatever you speak, and Dosti will reply and walk you across into English one step at a time.
Two minutes, no account. Say something imperfect and get it back slightly better.
Start speaking English