PresenceMost public speaking advice, slow down, breathe, pause before you answer, quietly assumes the only thing happening in your head is nerves. If English isn’t your first language, there’s a second process running at the same time, finding the word, checking the grammar, deciding if a phrase will land the way you mean it, and that changes which advice actually helps and which just adds pressure.
The advice assumes one thing you might not have: automatic English
For a native speaker, the words mostly take care of themselves, which is why advice like “just relax and it’ll come out fine” works reasonably well for them. If you’re also translating or self-monitoring grammar in real time, “just relax” doesn’t remove that second process, it just adds guilt about still feeling tense on top of it. That’s not a sign the advice is wrong in general, it’s a sign it was written for a different starting point than yours.
What’s actually yours to fix, and what isn’t
It helps to separate two things that get lumped together as “public speaking anxiety.” Delivery habits, talking too fast, filling gaps with sound instead of silence, trailing off at the end of a sentence, are the same skill for everyone, and they’re learnable the same way regardless of what your first language is. Accent and word choice are a different thing entirely, and most listeners are also more forgiving of them than a nervous speaker assumes, an audience following a talk on content is not running a grammar check in their head. Sorting out which of your worries is actually a delivery habit, fixable with practice, and which is a language concern that’s less consequential than it feels, is often most of the battle on its own.
Practicing out loud still works, maybe more
Rehearsing a talk or an answer out loud does something specific when English is a second language: it moves the word-finding and phrasing decisions earlier, into a lower-pressure moment, so they’re already settled by the time you’re actually speaking under pressure. That frees up attention that would otherwise be split between finding words and managing delivery, which is exactly the split that makes real-time speaking feel harder than writing the same thing down would.
Where a tool like Presence fits in
Presence scores delivery, pace, fillers, hedging, pauses, the same way regardless of whether English is your first language or your third, so a rehearsed answer gets checked on the same terms as anyone else’s. That’s useful specifically because it separates the delivery habit from the language worry: if the score says your pace and filler rate are fine, the thing you were anxious about probably wasn’t showing up the way you thought.
When this isn’t the right tool
Presence’s recording analysis currently works with English speech, so it won’t score a take rehearsed in another language, and it doesn’t check grammar, vocabulary or accent at all, those are a different kind of feedback than a delivery score. If accent clarity specifically is the concern, that’s a separate skill from pace, fillers and pausing, and worth treating as its own thing rather than expecting a delivery score to speak to it.
FAQ
Is it normal to feel more anxious speaking in a second language, even when I’m fluent? Yes. Managing word choice and grammar in real time is genuine cognitive load on top of the content itself, even at a fluent level, so more effort going into a talk is expected, not a sign something’s wrong.
Should I focus on my accent or on delivery first? Delivery habits, pace, fillers, pausing, usually have a bigger effect on how a talk lands than accent does, and they’re the more direct thing a recording can check.
Does Presence score speech in languages other than English? The interface and Learn library are available in 21 languages, but recording analysis currently works with English speech specifically, regardless of which language the app itself is set to.
Will rehearsing out loud in advance actually help with the anxiety, or just the words? Both. Settling the wording in advance frees up attention during the actual talk, which tends to reduce the felt pressure as a side effect, not just improve what you say.