The Verbs Say, Tell, Talk, Speak in English

When it comes to the verbs Say, Tell, Talk, Speak in English, many students are confused. Since the learners are our inspiration for this blog, the following is meant to help them use the four verbs correctly and understand them better in context.

The verbs Say, Tell, Talk, Speak are very similar, however most of the time they cannot be used interchangeably.

SAY/TELL

These verbs are slightly different in the way they are used:

SAY means to express something with words, and

TELL means to give information to a person or to instruct.

Examples:

“Where are they going? She didn’t tell me.” (She didn’t give me the information)

“What did he say?” (what did he express with words?)

“What did he tell you?” (what information did he give you?)

“Say ‘hi’ to Paul for me!”

“Tom’s mother tells him to clean his room.” (instructs him)

Another very important difference is that when you use TELL you MUST have a person following the verb.

For example: “He tells me to do it.” (“me” is the person following the verb “tells”)

SAY is most often used without a person following it.

For example: “Where are they going? She didn’t say.”

If we want to put a person after SAY, we use the preposition to, as in: “I say to all the people of this great country, let’s come together!”

Here are some more illustrations of this difference in almost identical sentences:

“I want to say something about our teacher.”

“I want to tell him something about our teacher.”

“Did he say how it happened?”

“Did he tell you how it happened?”

SPEAK/TALK

Many times you can use SPEAK and TALK interchangeably, but there are a few slight differences between them:

SPEAK is a bit more formal. It also refers to more general topics than TALK.

For example:

“Can I speak with you?”

This is quite general, we’re not being specific about what we want to speak about. But it also sounds a bit more formal, and it sounds like the conversation will be important.

When you use TALK you might add the proposition “about”, as in “Talk about something.”, and TALK is a little more specific.

“Can I talk with you?”

This is a little more casual, a little informal, it doesn’t sound as important. And if we add “about” we can add some more detail, as in “Can we talk about your brother?”

IMPORTANT NOTES

1. You can only use SPEAK when you’re talking about languages.

“They speak French.” NOT “They talk French.”

Though you might hear people say “They talk in French”.

“How many languages do you speak?” NOT “How many languages do you talk?”

2. The following prepositions can be used with these verbs: to, with, about.  You can talk to someone, you can speak to someone, you can talk with someone, or you can speak with someone, or you can speak about something, or you can talk about something – or someone.

QUIZ

Choose the correct verb in the sentences below:

1. Let’s __________ my mother that we forgot.
2. What do you want to ______ ?
3. Does she _________ Arabic?
4. We usually _________ about the weather.
5. I would like to _________ to you about our marriage.
6. The teacher __________ me to do my homework every day.

ANSWERS

1. tell
2. say
3. speak
4. talk
5. speak
6. tells

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