Spontanika

Keep talking,
without stopping

The announcer names a random word — and you talk about it until the next one arrives. Twenty minutes of this loosens the tongue far better than any theory of public speaking.

Get it for iPhone Coming to the App Store shortly
Session setup screen A session in progress: the word and both timers Practice history and the daily streak

What this is

Spontanika is an exercise in spontaneous speech, devised in 2014 and refined over hundreds of sessions since. The premise is simple: you do not prepare, you do not pick the topic, and you have no time to think an answer through. The word comes from outside, and you have to speak at once — out loud, firmly, with no "uhm" and no inner editing.

After a few sessions something characteristic happens: words stop being invented and start arriving on their own. That moment — when speech runs ahead of thought — is the whole point of the practice.

How a session goes

  1. Pick a duration and an intervalTwenty minutes with the word changing every two is the usual place to start.
  2. The call-sign sounds, the announcer names a wordOne of eleven chimes warns you of the change, then the word is spoken aloud. The screen can flash instead — for practising in silence.
  3. You speak until the word changesWithout stopping and without judging what you just said. The app keeps time and watches the interval for you.
  4. Speech is recognized on the phone itselfOptional: what you said is stored in the history word by word, with your pace and filler-word count. Nothing is uploaded anywhere.

The whole point

The exercise has one condition without which it does not work: hold your gaze — on yourself in a mirror or on your partner — without looking away and without focusing. The gaze moves between four points, and only while the call-sign is sounding.

Diagram: four gaze points — between the brows, bridge of the nose, left and right eye The whole point page in the app

Three exercises and experiments

Attributes of an object

You find adjectives and phrases for the word: wooden, thrown out of the window, painted on the wall.

Speaking as the object

"I am a watermelon." From there, about yourself as that object: what you feel, what you know, what you like.

About the object

Everything you know and do not know about the word. Here it shows most clearly how speech outruns a prepared thought.

A separate chapter covers experiments: sessions two to three hours long, speech stripped of intonation, and an attempt to drop inner pronunciation — the most costly stage on a word's way out.

Diagram: image, thought, saying it inside, speech aloud An exercise page with an example

What is in the app

Over a thousand words

Eleven categories of nouns that form vivid images. You can add your own dictionaries.

Russian and English

Interface language, word language and the method text switch independently.

Entirely offline

No accounts, no server. Speech recognition runs on the device and recordings never leave the phone.

History and streaks

Every session is kept: duration, words, a transcript of what you said, and your run of consecutive days.

Lock screen

The word and both timers appear in a Live Activity; headphones change words.

The full method

The same 2014 text as the original — with diagrams and examples, right inside the app.