TO TALK TO/WITH SOMEONE

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Daily Vitamin. I hope everyone had a good break and I hope your year has started off well.

We are going to start off 2026 looking at different forms, expressions and uses of the word talk. The word talk is used frequently in English and has verb, noun and adjective forms. It also forms a part of many expressions and phrasal verbs.

Today we will look at the verb talk as it is used with different prepositions or verb particles.

TALK TO  SOMEONE
Meaning: to have a conversation with someone.

Example 1: I talked to Bob yesterday. Did you know his wife is expecting a child?

TALK WITH  SOMEONE
Meaning: to have a conversation with someone.

Example 2: The next time you talk with the downstairs neighbours, please ask them if they'd like to come for dinner next week.

NOTE: There is no important difference in meaning between talk to someone and talk with someone. However, it is perhaps more common in Standard British English to use the preposition to. If you are a native Spanish or Catalan speaker, you will probably feel more comfortable using the preposition with.

TALK ABOUT SOMEONE-SOMETHING
Meaning: to have a conversation about something or someone.

Example 3: If all of you have finished talking about who won the football league, perhaps we can get down to work.

We can use these same preposition combinations (talk to-with-about) to mean: to discuss a problem.

Example 4: We really need to talk to the boss about our working conditions.

Tomorrow we will look at a couple of phrasal verbs with the word talk.

To get some writing practice, I encourage you to write sentences with one or more of these TALK phrases. You can post your sentences to one of our social media sites (Facebook or Bluesky) and we will give you feedback about your writing as soon as possible.

Enjoy the rest of your day!