Language Guide

Practise a language
out loud with Claude

By Dan Donovan, @askdandonovan

An app teaches you words. It does not teach you to speak. These are the three prompts that turn Claude's voice mode into a speaking partner you can be bad in front of.

3 Prompts
~10 min First session
10 Languages
$0 Cost

What this actually is

On 23 July 2026 Anthropic rebuilt Claude's voice mode. It now speaks ten languages, you can change language in the middle of a conversation, and it runs on the free plan.

That matters because of a specific gap. Language apps are good at vocabulary and grammar drills, and you can get quite far into one and still freeze the moment a real person speaks to you. Reading a menu is a different skill to answering the waiter.

The thing that fixes it is speaking badly, out loud, over and over, somewhere nobody is watching. That has always been the hard part to arrange. It is not hard any more.

What you'll have after this
A scene you can replay
Ordering coffee, buying a ticket, meeting the in-laws
A way out when you're stuck
Ask in English, get the phrase, carry on
Your actual mistakes, listed
What you said, what you should have said, why
Something you'll do again
Ten minutes on your phone, no booking, no audience
Do this in the next 10 minutes

Prompt 1: give it the scene

Open the Claude app on your phone, turn on voice mode, and paste this. The mistake almost everyone makes is saying "let's practise Spanish", which gets you a polite tutor reading you a textbook. Give it a scene, a role and your level instead.

Prompt 1 of 3 
We're going to practise Spanish out loud. I'm about A2, so keep it
simple but don't talk down to me.

You are a waiter in a busy cafe in Madrid. I'm a customer ordering
coffee and something to eat. Stay in character the whole time.

Correct me as we go, but keep the conversation moving. Don't stop to
give me a grammar lesson unless I ask.

That is the whole first session. The two prompts below make it better, but if you only do this one thing tonight, you have already done the part that works.

Before you start: you need the Claude app on your phone and nothing else. Voice mode is in beta on mobile, desktop and web, and Anthropic says it works best from your phone. No paid plan required.
1

Make the scene yours

The prompt above is a template with three moving parts. Change those three and it fits any language and any situation you are actually nervous about.

  • The language. Swap Spanish for any of the ten below.
  • Your level. If you don't know it, describe what you can do. "I can read a menu but I freeze when someone speaks to me" is more useful to it than "B1".
  • The scene. This is the one people leave generic, and it is the one that matters.

Scenes worth stealing, roughly in order of how uncomfortable they are:

cafe ordering, paying
pharmacy describing a symptom
ticket window times, platforms, changes
taxi directions, small talk
dinner your partner's family
interview talking about your work
Reuse the same scene until it bores you. Ordering coffee five times is how it becomes automatic. Variety feels productive and mostly is not.
2

The escape hatch

This is the one that makes it better than a class. When you get stuck you do not have to stay stuck, and you do not have to be embarrassed. Say this out loud, in English, mid conversation.

Prompt 2 of 3 
Switch to English for a second. How would I say "I'd like it with
oat milk, and can I get the bill"? Give me the phrase, then go
straight back into character and let me try it.

In a class this is the moment you go quiet for the rest of the hour. Here nobody is waiting on you, nobody else is in the room, and it costs nothing.

One honest note. Anthropic's own page says you can switch languages mid conversation. TechCrunch's write-up of the same update says you have to specify the language when you switch. Both readings are compatible, so if simply asking in English does not flip it, use the language picker in the app. Same result, one extra tap.
3

The mistake list

Almost nobody does this one, and it is where the learning actually happens. At the end of the conversation:

Prompt 3 of 3 
We're done. List every mistake I made, as a short list.

For each one: what I said, what I should have said, and a five word
note on why. Don't soften them and don't pad the list with things I
got right.

Then give me the three that will matter most next time.

You will not notice your own mistakes while you are concentrating on speaking. That is not a discipline problem, it is how attention works. The list is the whole reason this beats talking to yourself.

Keep the lists. Paste last week's in at the start of the next session and ask whether you still make those. That is the closest thing here to a progress report.

The ten languages, and what it costs

Anthropic's wording is exact and worth quoting, because the free tier is better than people expect: "On the Free plan, you get Claude Haiku, one connected tool, and all available languages." So the free plan gets the fast model and every language it supports. Paid plans get more capable models and more connected tools, which matter elsewhere and barely matter here.

English
French
German
Hindi
Indonesian
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Portuguese Brazilian
Spanish Latin America and Spain

A realistic week, because a plan you don't follow is worse than none: