Why Can You Understand a Language but Not Speak It?

If you find that you’ve been practicing your new language for quite some time now, but when you try to have a conversation you, can barely string a sentence together, you’re not alone. It’s normal to be able to understand a language before you can actually use it in conversation. Just understanding alone is a measurement of how much progress you’ve made with your foreign language.

Understanding Comes Before Speaking

Before you can speak a language, you need a significant amount of vocabulary and exposure to that language. Even when you learned your first language, you didn’t start speaking right away. It took you a couple years as a baby just absorbing the sounds around you before you could articulate the words in your language. You’ll be able to learn much more quickly now than you did as a baby, but you’re still going to need to understand what you hear before you can speak.

Understanding at the Micro-Level

You can start speaking your target language from day one, but the ability to converse naturally in that language takes years to develop. Your first day of learning your new language, you practice speaking by listening and repeating what you hear. This gradually develops into building sentences and having simple structured conversations - not spontaneous, natural ones. You’re building the foundation for these fluent conversations that happen as you progress.

As you learn more vocabulary and create more unique sentences during the beginning stage of language learning, you’ll gradually develop the skill to speak more and more naturally. It’ll be clunky and full of mistakes at first, but over time it’ll smooth out with practice as you become more fluent.

Understanding at the Macro-Level

You may feel like you understand but cannot speak when you interact with native speakers because you’re unable to articulate yourself as well as you’d like to. You actually can speak. You’re not yet at the level of speaking necessary to carry on a conversation. You can formulate simple sentences and read simple texts, but when that structure is no longer there, you fumble for your words.

This is normal and just means you need more practice in conversations. You may have spent more time studying from your books, memorizing vocabulary and grammar in the beginning. That’s going to serve you now, but you’ll need to change up your study routine to include conversation practice with a speaker of that language if you want to become a better speaker.

Understanding is Always First

There won’t ever be a time when you can speak better than you can understand because you can only formulate your thoughts into words with information that you already know. You can learn more to improve your speaking, but you’ll be understanding that new information before you process it to use it in your speaking no matter how fast you learn.

It’s always more challenging to speak (or write) a language than to listen (or read) because you’re not only recalling the vocabulary you need. You’re thinking about how to respond to communicate your desired message and trying to use a language that’s new to you. It’s a lot to do all at once. Whereas with listening & reading, you only have to recognize the majority of what is said to gather context and understand.

Become a Better Speaker

The more you read, write, speak, and listen, the better speaker you will become. Your passive practice of reading and listening will increase your exposure to the language, and your speaking and writing will improve your ability to actually use the language. All four core skills are necessary to improve your fluency to become a better speaker.

If your primary focus is improving your speaking, you’ll benefit from dedicating extra time to explicit speaking practice. You’ll need all four skills working together, but emphasize speaking with a conversation partner, tutor, or any other way available to you. The more feedback you can get about your speaking - and other skills - the more you’ll be able to improve. It’s a constant process of practice and correction until you reach a level you’re satisfied with.

Remember, being able to understand more than you can speak is a sign of progress. It means you’ve learned a significant amount of your target language and are ready to level up and shift your focus over to applying those skills to become an awesome speaker.