Speaking
IELTS speaking hobbies questions come up in Part 1 constantly, and they are deceptively easy to answer badly. The subject is comfortable, the vocabulary is familiar, and that combination produces some of the shortest answers in the whole test. This page shows how to build a one-word answer into thirty seconds without inventing anything.
Examiner: What sports do you like?
Candidate: Football.
Accurate and useless. The first improvement is to add an opinion with an adjective attached to it.
Candidate: I think football is genuinely exciting, both to watch and to play.
Better, and still under three seconds. The second improvement is to justify the opinion and set it against something else.
Candidate: I think football is genuinely exciting, both to watch and to play, mainly because there is so much happening at once — players covering the whole pitch, the shape of the game changing every few seconds. Compare that with something like golf, which I find almost unwatchable, and the difference is obvious. I played until I was about twenty and I still miss it, though these days I am firmly on the sofa.
exhilarating, absorbing, breathtaking, addictive, rewarding, physical, fast-paced, competitive
tedious, uneventful, repetitive, gruelling, terrifying, overrated, slow, aggressive
demanding, solitary, technical, time-consuming, expensive, seasonal, niche
take up, get into, give up, be hooked on, dabble in, stick with, get out of the habit of
That last group matters. Part 1 questions about hobbies almost always involve time — when you started, whether you still do it, whether it has changed. Phrasal verbs of starting and stopping are exactly the vocabulary that fits, and they read as natural rather than studied.
Record yourself, then open the model and look for the moves you did not make, rather than the words you did not use.
I have picked up and abandoned a lot of things over the years, but the one that has stuck is cooking, which I got into properly about three years ago. What I like about it is that it is completely absorbing — you cannot think about work while you are trying not to burn something. It is also one of the few hobbies where you have something at the end of it. I would not call myself good, exactly. I am confident with about eight dishes and hopeless outside them.
Honestly, most of it goes on things I would not describe as hobbies — a certain amount of scrolling, a certain amount of television. The part I would actually defend is walking. I try to get out for an hour most evenings, partly for the exercise but mostly because it is the only time in the day when nobody can contact me. I have become one of those people who has opinions about waterproof jackets, which I never expected.
Playing, without question, although I do far less of it than I used to. Watching has never really appealed to me — I can see why it does, and I understand the appeal of belonging to something, but sitting still for two hours has the opposite effect on me from the one it seems to have on everybody else. Playing is different. Even badly, even five-a-side on a wet Tuesday, it is the only exercise I have ever managed to keep up.
Anything that involves heights, which rules out a surprising amount — climbing, skydiving, even those high ropes courses people do for team building. It is not a rational fear and I have never tried to fix it. Beyond that, I would say anything that requires you to collect things. I understand the pleasure intellectually, but the idea of an incomplete set bothering me for years sounds like a burden rather than a hobby.
If your cue card is about a free-time activity, expect the discussion to widen considerably. These are the directions it usually takes, and each one needs an opinion with a reason rather than a description.
Do people have more or less free time than they did a generation ago?
Should schools require children to take part in sport?
Why do some hobbies become fashionable and then disappear?
Is it a problem that many hobbies are now expensive?
Record yourself whenever you practise. Nearly every phone will do it. Listening back is the only way to notice the words you repeat and the places where your voice goes flat, and both of those are being scored.