--- title: "10 måder at stoppe med at sige øh, når du taler" description: "Ti praktiske, venlige teknikker til at reducere fyldord som øhm og altså, plus et gratis værktøj til at måle din egen rate, før du starter." canonical: "https://www.yaps.ai/da/blog/how-to-stop-saying-um" language: "da-DK" --- Indgang 02 Guide · 30 AUG 2026 # 10 måder at stoppe med at sige øh, når du taler Øh og uh er ikke en fejl i din tale. Målet er ikke at fjerne dem, men at forhindre dem i at erstatte den pause, en selvsikker sætning har lov til at have. Her er ti konkrete måder at øve det på, plus et gratis værktøj til at måle, hvor du faktisk står. Yaps Team 10 min læst [Tilbage til journalen](/da/blog) **I denne post** INDGANG 02 · 4 AFSNIT - [0.0 Forord](#preface) - [1.0 10 teknikker til at stoppe med at sige øh](#10-techniques-to-stop-saying-um) - [2.0 En tre-sessioners måde at øve dette på](#a-three-session-way-to-practise-this) - [3.0 Ofte stillede spørgsmål](#frequently-asked-questions) - [·Hvorfor siger jeg øh og ah så meget?](#why-do-i-say-um-and-uh-so-much) - [·Er fyldord faktisk dårlige?](#are-filler-words-actually-bad) - [·Hvor mange fyldord er normale?](#how-many-filler-words-is-normal) - [·Er det dårligt at sige "like" meget?](#is-it-bad-to-say-like-a-lot) Indgang 02 · Journalen Yaps 30 AUG 2026 · 10 min læst Vejledning ![En række af grå um gentaget, med én erstattet af en kort glødende stang, der repræsenterer en tavs pause](/images/blog/how-to-stop-saying-um.jpg) 0.0 ## Forord Um and uh are not a flaw in your speech. Every language linguists have studied has some version of them, and people who speak in full, unscripted sentences use them constantly, including the ones you think of as articulate. A filler word often does real work: it tells the listener you are still thinking and have not finished. So this is not a post about eliminating them. A talk with zero fillers usually sounds recited rather than spoken. The real goal is narrower: do not let a filler word replace a pause you are allowed to take. That distinction is the whole point. A silent pause reads as someone choosing their words. The same gap filled with "um" reads as someone unsure what to say next, even when the thinking behind both is identical. Nobody can hear the difference between your brain planning a sentence and your brain stalling. They can only hear whether you filled the gap with sound or left it alone. Before you change anything, it helps to know where you stand. Yaps has a free [filler word counter](/tools/filler-word-counter) that does exactly that. Paste in a transcript, a recording you had transcribed, or a rough draft, and it gives you a total, a rate, a grade, a read time, and a breakdown by category you can click through to filter. As the tool's own page puts it, "your text stays in the page. The matching happens in JavaScript in the tab in front of you, so nothing is posted anywhere and there is no account to make." That makes it a reasonable place to paste an interview transcript or a draft you have not shown anyone yet. 01 / What it costs Free No account, no signup, no limit on how much text you paste in 02 / Where it runs Your tab The matching happens locally, so nothing you paste is uploaded 03 / Categories tracked 9 From hesitations like um to weak openers like there is 04 / A-grade threshold 1.5% The share of your words flagged, not a raw count Key Takeaway ¶ You are not trying to talk like a script. You are trying to let a pause be a pause instead of covering it with a sound. Everything below is a different way to practise that one shift. > A silent pause and a filled pause can hold the exact same thought. Only one of them sounds uncertain, and that is the part worth changing. > > > Yaps One more thing before the list. If you are here because of a stammer or another speech difference rather than a habit, please read this paragraph as it is meant, gently. Generic advice like "just leave a silent pause" is built for fluent speakers who have picked up a habit, and it is not the right frame for a speech condition. If that is your situation, a speech and language therapist is a far better guide than a blog post, and there is nothing to fix here on your own timeline. Prøv det selv Du kunne have dikteret hele denne artikel nu. Yaps forvandler din stemme til ren tekst. På din enhed, selv offline. [Download Yaps](/da/download)iPhone · Android · Windows · Mac · Linux 1.0 ## 10 teknikker til at stoppe med at sige øh 1. **Record yourself and get a real baseline.** You cannot fix a rate you have not measured, and most people over- or underestimate how often they say um. Record two or three minutes of yourself talking about something ordinary, transcribe it, and paste it into the [filler word counter](/tools/filler-word-counter) to see the total and rate. Do this once before anything else, so later attempts have a number to compare against instead of a feeling. 2. **Replace the filler with a silent pause.** This is the core move. Wherever "um" would normally land, stop completely instead, even if it feels like an uncomfortably long beat at first. Practise it in a low-stakes setting, ordering food, describing your weekend, and let the silence sit there rather than rushing to fill it. It will feel exposed for a few tries and then start to feel like nothing at all. 3. **Slow down your overall pace.** Filler words spike when your mouth is moving faster than your thinking has caught up to, which is why they cluster on the hardest, least-rehearsed parts of what you are saying. Deliberately talking ten or twenty percent slower gives each thought time to arrive before you need the next word. Try reading a paragraph aloud at your normal pace, then again noticeably slower, and notice how much less you reach for a filler the second time. 4. **Prepare the first sentence before you start.** A large share of filler words show up in the first few seconds of a turn, the exact moment you have not yet decided how to begin. Decide your opening sentence in advance, word for word if it helps, before a call, a meeting update, or an answer to a question you know is coming. Everything after that first sentence tends to flow more easily once you are no longer choosing the opening line live. 5. **Breathe at the punctuation.** Most people only take a breath once they are running out of air, which forces speech out in one long unbroken stretch with no natural stopping points. Instead, take a small, quiet breath at the end of each sentence or clause, the way punctuation works on a page. That breath becomes a built-in pause, and a pause you already planned is much easier to leave silent. 6. **Shorten your sentences.** A long sentence gives you more chances to lose the thread partway through it, and losing the thread is where a filler tends to appear. Practise saying the same idea as two or three short sentences instead of one long one strung together with "and" and "so". Short sentences also read as more confident on their own. 7. **Ask someone to signal when it happens.** Practising alone only gets you so far, because part of the habit is not noticing it in the moment. Ask someone you trust to give a small, agreed signal, a raised finger, a tap, whenever you say your filler word during an ordinary conversation. That real-time feedback builds the awareness that makes the pause-instead-of-filler swap possible live, not just in rehearsal. 8. **Read aloud from a page every day.** Reading someone else's sentences aloud strips out the hardest part of speaking, deciding what to say, and leaves you free to work purely on delivery. Read a page from a book or an article aloud for a few minutes daily, paying attention to your pacing, your breathing, and where you naturally pause. Anything you practise here in a low-pressure setting is what will show up automatically when you are speaking live and thinking on your feet at the same time. 9. **Find your one or two crutch words.** Most people do not lean on a scattered list of fillers, they lean on two or three specific ones, "like", "you know", "so", far more than the rest. Once you know which words are actually yours, from a transcript rather than a guess, you can listen for them specifically instead of policing your speech in general. Hearing yourself say your own crutch word out loud is usually the moment it starts to change. 10. **Practise with dictation and read the transcript back.** Talking to a dictation app and then reading the raw output is one of the fastest ways to see your own pattern, because a faithful transcript catches every filler exactly as it happened, false starts included. Try dictating a short update or a few paragraphs, then read the unedited text back and notice where the fillers landed and what you were doing right before each one. That pairing of speaking and immediately reading is more useful than listening to a recording, because you see the pattern rather than just hearing it once and forgetting the details. Normal, not a problem 04 - An occasional um or uh while you think mid-sentence in unscripted speech. - More fillers when tired or nervous the rate rises under pressure for almost everyone. - A higher rate in a second language more thinking time needed is not a fluency failure. - Zero fillers in a rehearsed speech their total absence is what actually sounds recited. Worth working on 04 - A filler in nearly every sentence density is what a listener actually notices, not any single instance. - Filling every pause automatically the habit that this whole list is aimed at breaking. - Not knowing your own crutch words you cannot hear something coming that you have never named. - Never checking whether it is improving a felt sense of progress is not the same as a measured one. 2.0 ## En tre-sessioners måde at øve dette på You do not need all ten techniques at once. A simple loop across a few sessions works better than trying to fix everything on the first attempt. Session 01 ### Measure the baseline 5 min Record yourself talking about something ordinary, transcribe it, and run it through the filler word counter. Note the rate and which one or two words show up most. Session 02 ### Practise the pause, not the fix A week Pick two or three techniques from the list above that fit your situation and practise them in ordinary, low-stakes talking, not just the moment you are trying to get right. Session 03 ### Recheck the number 5 min Record a similar sample again and compare the rate to your baseline. Treat the number as a direction rather than a verdict, and repeat the loop rather than expecting one pass to finish the job. There is one more angle worth naming separately. Yaps dictation runs a cleanup model on your device as you speak, and it removes filler words automatically before the text lands at your cursor, so what you end up with is already a clean sentence rather than a raw transcript you have to edit. That is a different job from the counter above. The counter shows you the pattern after the fact so you can practise speaking differently, while the dictation cleanup happens live, so the fillers never reach the document you send. 01 Prøv Yaps ## Dictate naturally and let the cleanup happen on your device. Yaps runs on Android, iPhone and iPad, Windows, macOS and Linux, and removes filler words automatically as you speak. [Download Yaps](/da/download)or[yaps.ai](/da) Scan med dit telefonkamera 3.0 ## Ofte stillede spørgsmål ### Why do I say um and uh so much? Fillers fill the gap while your brain is still choosing a word or a sentence structure, and everyone's speech includes them because everyone needs that gap sometimes. They tend to increase when you are tired, nervous, or thinking further ahead than you are talking. None of that means anything is wrong with you, it is just how live, unscripted speech works. ### Are filler words actually bad? Not on their own, and not in moderation. A talk with zero fillers at all usually sounds rehearsed rather than natural, and a listener rarely notices a single um in an otherwise clear sentence. What reads as unclear is density, a filler in nearly every sentence, or filling every pause automatically instead of ever letting a silence sit. ### How many filler words is normal? There is no fixed number that applies to everyone, since it depends on the setting, how familiar the topic is, and whether you are speaking your first or a second language. The Yaps [filler word counter](/tools/filler-word-counter) treats a rate under about one and a half percent of your total words as an A, and the grade slides down from there, but treat it as a rough gauge for tracking your own change, not a pass or fail line. ### Is it bad to say "like" a lot? "Like" used as a discourse marker works the same way um and uh do, a normal filler rather than a sign of anything wrong with your thinking or vocabulary. It becomes noticeable when it shows up several times in one sentence, because that is when a listener starts hearing the word instead of the sentence. The fix is the same as for any other filler: notice it is one of your crutch words, and practise the silent pause instead of it. ### I stammer, does this advice apply to me? Not directly, and it is worth saying plainly. This kind of advice, replace the filler with a silent pause, slow down, is built around a habit that fluent speakers can choose to change, and it is not the right frame for a stammer or another speech difference. If that is your situation, a speech and language therapist is a far better guide than any general advice here. ### Will people think I am unintelligent if I say um a lot? There is no solid basis for that claim, and this post will not make it. What listeners respond to is density and pattern: a sentence with an occasional um is heard as someone thinking, while a sentence where every pause is filled can feel harder to follow. That is a listening-experience issue, not a reflection of what is going on in your head. ### How do I reduce filler words in a presentation? Prepare your opening sentence so you are not composing it live under the most pressure of the talk, and rehearse breathing at the natural breaks in your script rather than only when you run out of air. Practise leaving your planned pauses silent rather than automatically filling them, since a presentation is exactly where a silent pause reads as composure. Reading your script aloud daily in the run-up builds the pacing so it is not new on the day. ### How do I stop saying um in a job interview? Interviews spike filler rates because you are thinking and being evaluated at the same time, a genuinely harder mode than ordinary conversation. Prepare the first sentence of your answer to questions you can predict, since that removes the exact moment fillers cluster most. A brief silent pause after a tricky question reads as someone considering their answer, a better impression than filling that second with um. ### Does speaking a second language mean I will have more filler words? Often, yes, and that is not a sign you are less fluent. It reflects the extra work of retrieving words and grammar in a language you learned later. The same techniques apply, slowing down, preparing an opening line, finding your crutch word in that language, but there is no reason to hold yourself to the rate of a first-language speaker. ### Can dictation help me practise reducing filler words? Yes, in a specific way. Dictating a short passage and then reading the raw, unedited transcript back shows you exactly where your fillers land and what you were doing right before each one, more useful than only listening to a recording. Separately, Yaps dictation removes filler words automatically as part of its on-device cleanup, a different job from practising your speaking pattern. ### How do I measure whether I am actually improving? Record a similar sample of unscripted speech every week or two and run it through a filler word counter, comparing the rate rather than the raw count, since a longer sample will always have a higher total. Track your own number over time instead of comparing yourself to someone else's speech, and expect the trend to matter more than any single reading. ### What is the fastest single change to make? Practising the silent pause where a filler used to go. Slowing down and preparing your opening sentence both make that pause easier to hold, but the pause itself is the change that actually removes the filler, everything else in this list supports that one shift. ### Does this apply to writing as well as speaking? Partly. Writing does not have the same live thinking-time pressure that speech does, but rambling drafts pick up their own filler-like habits, wordy phrases, weak openers, hedging language. The Yaps filler word counter checks for those alongside spoken fillers, since a transcript and a rough draft share more in common than people expect. ### Do I need an app to work on this? No. Recording yourself on any phone, reading a transcript by eye, and practising the silent pause in ordinary conversation covers the core of it. Tools like the filler word counter and dictation just make the pattern easier to see and the practice easier to repeat consistently. Journalen Yaps er skrevet med Yaps Sæt din stemme på arbejde. Rodet tale ind, ren tekst klar til at indsætte ud.Privat, offline først og gratis at starte. 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