Wittgenstein on the difficulty of speaking

I read the following entry in one of Wittgenstein's diaries today:

I speak far too easily. --- Through a question or an objection one can seduce me to produce a stream of words. While I talk I sometimes see that I am on an ugly track: that I say more than I mean, talk to amuse the other, draw in irrelevancies in order to impressionate and so forth. I then strive to correct the conversation, to steer it back onto a more decent course. But only turn it a little and not enough out of fear --- lack of courage --- & retain a bad taste.

This happens to me easily especially in England since the difficulty of communication (because of character, not because of the language) are enormous from the start. So that one must perform one's exercises on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground. For one never knows whether the other has entirely understood one; & the other has never understood oneentirely.

This entry is particularly interesting to me because the very same words can be used to express my own experience. Indeed, I find that the difficulty of communication makes me speak far too easily. This is not paradoxical, for the word "easily" does not mean without difficulty, but means likely to happen.

I speak faster in English than in Chinese even though English is my second language, and even though my spoken English is far from good. When I speak English, I am "on a swaying raft rather than on solid ground", so I have to move a lot to make sure that I am heading in the right direction.