Say / Tell / Speak / Talk

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Gold Forest English Podcast. My name is Jordan and to day I want to talk about talking… or more specifically I want to talk about the word talk and speak and tell and say.

These four words say, tell, speak and talk are used to discuss communication in English. We are communicating with other people or things or animals and we use these words to describe our communication, but they can be a bit confusing because they are very similar, but they do have some small differences. They can be confusing on how to use them. So I wanted to speak about them today. So let's look at them one by one.

The first one is say so when we use the word say, it's really focused on the words that the people are speaking, the words that the people are are communicating, we use the word say to really focus on the words and not so much on the listener. We don't have to use information. We don't have to talk about the listener. We don't have to talk about who was listening. So we can say things like she said she was tired or what did he say? They said the meeting was canceled. These are some example sentences that use the word say, and none of them have listener, none of them have an object, the listener, the person that is being talked to. She said she was tired. What did he say? They said the meeting was canceled. If we want to talk about the listener, we can use the word to. She said to me that she was tired. He said to us that he wanted to buy a pizza. So we can use the word to if we want to mention the listener, but we don't need to. It's not necessary.

This is different from the next word tell so in the word tell we almost always need a listener, an object, so we do nearly always use the words to talk about who was listening. For example: She tells us many things. She told me yesterday that she was tired. Can you tell him the time? They told us a funny story. So in these sentences we're using listener words, He told them. She told us, I told him. We are using these object words, these listener words. This is very important for tell. Tell is not so much focused on the words spoken, the words from the mouth. The important thing with tell is more about the information. What information was communicated? So, for example. She told me about the problem. She told me about the problem. The topic conversation topic was the problem, but she didn't use those specific words. She was using many different words, but the information that she communicated was about the problem. She told me about the problem.

So we've got say, which is focused on the words and we don't need a listener. Tell which is focused on the information, and we almost always use a listener word. and then we've also got words speak and talk.

So speak and talk are similar, speak is used a bit more formal situations. For example, He spoke to the manager about the problem. Please may I speak with you for a moment? It may be a bit more formal situation we use the word speak which is different from talk, which is more informal normally. We talked about our week end plans. He likes to talk to his friends after work. It's just people having a discussion people communicating together. Talk is a bit more informal and speak is a bit more formal.

So these are our main differences with say, tell, speak, and talk. Say is focused on the words that are from the mouth Tell is focused on the information, and it almost always needs an object, a listener. Speak is more common for formal situations, and talk is more common for informal situations.

So as normal, I have a full blog post on the website if you want some more examples, more detail, and some practice questions, you can check out our blog on Goldforestacademy.com.

Thank you very much for listening. That's all that I have to talk to you about today. Thank you for listening. I hope you have a good week and I'll see you in the next episode. Goodbye.