Why You Understand but Can't Speak Fluently (Step-by-Step Solution)

has this ever happened to you let's say you're having a conversation in your target language and you understand what is being said you get the main idea you get the gist of it but when it comes to your turn to speak it sounds clunky it sounds unnatural it sounds maybe even robotic or let's say you're with a group of native speakers and they're all speaking with each other and you understand the main idea you understand the gist of things but you're staying quiet and you're hoping that they don't ask you anything and you're anxious because

when they do you get nervous and you're afraid that you won't be able to say what you want you're afraid that you're going to freeze up does this sound familiar why does this happen it often stems from some common myths about listening and speaking in our target language you think you can improve your speaking the same way that you improve your listening you think learning a lot of vocabulary will help you speak better you think that focusing on listening alone will translate to speaking fluently but we know that this isn't true always a common example

of this is Children of immigrant parents who move to a new country so for example ABC's american-born Chinese they grow up listening and hearing their parents speaking Chinese Mandarin Cantonese in the household so they're listening is very good but when it comes time to speak because they haven't practiced speaking that much they're not very good at speaking and so it's no surprise that their listening is far better than their speaking so we know that listening and speaking are related they help each other but they are also very different skills listening helps with speaking but listening

alone won't make you fluent so why is speaking so hard why are we more likely to improve our listening way before we improve our speaking the answer is quite simple many Learners when they start learning in their target language a new language they focus on listening first for many different reasons listening can be done totally passively which I actually recommend as a beginner even when you don't understand anything even when you don't understand the vocabulary if you don't understand the pronunciation the tones you can still gain a lot you can still benefit you can still

learn The rhythms and the sounds of the language and get used to that without understanding anything at all so there's still benefit to listening as a beginner speaking on the other hand can't be done passively so if you've ever tried speaking you need to focus your whole attention on it you can't be passively doing it in the background you have to coordinate a lot of different moving pieces for example your pronunciation your tones your opinion if you're learning Mandarin Chinese like I am you have to coordinate vocabulary you have to actively recall that vocabulary you

have to think about how to structure your sentences and this is happening all on the spot not to mention you also have to understand what the other person is saying even if you do know the vocabulary your mouth has to be trained over repetition to reproduce those sounds so you have to train that muscle memory on top of that listening alone is easier because you're getting clues all the time from the context so even if you don't understand every word in a sentence you can still get Clues and context from the sentence from other parts

of the sentence you can get Clues from the whole conversation and get a general gist of what is going on even if you don't understand every word that's what makes listening a lot easier than speaking with speaking not only do not have these Clues from Context you also like I mentioned you have to actively recall words whereas with listening the speakers are saying the words and you get to hear the word in your target language and you get to hear how it's naturally pronounced and so this is priming your memory so then you can say

oh they said that word I remember that word when I learned it in this scenario I remember doing that flash card I remember looking it up in my dictionary it primes your memory whereas with speaking you have to actively go back into your memory recall that and then reproduce it without any priming at all so that's why it's much more harder and on top of all of this let's not forget that there's the whole added challenge of social pressure and anxiety whenever we're speaking there's also the social aspect of things and this is not limited

to our target language Even in our native language there's many people for example with English where there's social anxiety speaking or having conversations so don't think that this is just a language learning thing or that you're a bad language learn learner don't be too hard on yourself because this takes practice this is also overcoming that anxiety especially if you're an introvert like me but this is a topic for a whole another video if you're interested in that I can make a video on that but the important point to notice is that if you find yourself

in the position where you're speaking is not as good as you're listening if you're listening is Miles better than you're speaking you can understand a lot of things this is actually a very good place to be it's not a bad place why is that cuz it means that you're on the right track it means that you've already built up enough vocabulary that you can start understanding conversations and all you have to do is figure out the next step so the typical progression of language learning looks like this in stage one phase one you usually you

can't understand and you can't speak so makes sense because you haven't exposed yourself phase two is usually because you get a lot more input you're able to understand so you can understand but you can't speak phase three is when you start understanding more and you can speak so this is the natural progression most people they can understand more before they can speak it's very unnatural it would be very weird if you could speak before you understand so if you find yourself in the position where you're listening is way better than you're speaking do not beat

yourself up it means you're in the right place and then you just need to figure out how to effectively improve your speaking okay so how do we improve our speaking then Einstein famously stated you can't solve a problem on the same level that it was created but many Learners make the mistake of thinking that you can improve your speaking the same way you improve your listening but we quickly realize that this is not practical and this is not possible because of the reasons that we discussed earlier speaking is much more complicated it's much more complex

it's combining and coordinating a lot of different moving pieces whereas listening you can just listen passively while you're doing the dishes while you're commuting while you're walking doing the chores exercising and you don't have to be focused 100% whereas speaking you not only have to be focused 100% you have to be coordinating a lot of different things on top of that with listening you can listen to basically anything you want you can listen to a broad range of topics and you can still benefit from that because you're not it's not really about the topic you're

listening and you're still benefiting from the tones and the the sounds of the language and the intonations and you're getting you're getting a gist of the sounds of the language you're learning the ropes of the language with speaking because the friction is so much higher because you have to be so much more focused because you can't do it passively there's much less opportunity to practice your speaking and so it's no wonder that if you're practicing your your listening throughout the day for many more hours your listening is going to improve much faster whereas when we

have less opportunity to practice our speaking it's no wonder that our speaking is less developed so it's much harder to build momentum with our speaking it's much harder to build confidence it's much harder to see progress and to build motivation to keep going so this means that we have to be much more selective on how we practice our speaking whereas with listening we can listen to anything that we wants we can listen to a lot of different topics with speaking because there's so little opportunity and chances to practice our speaking we have to be much

more selective and also much more careful on how we practice our speaking so what should we do what's the best way to improve your speaking when I studied Kinesiology in my undergrad we learned about a very important principle this was the principle of specificity what does this mean it means your training works best when it matches your goal the type of exercise how often you do it and how long you train should all line up with what you want to achieve the closer your training is to your goal the better your results will be for

example a sprinter should train for sprinting not Marathon running and a bodybuilder should focus on strength training not cardiovascular disease training should progress from General conditioning to specific training for the skills required IR ired in a sport or activity so similarly for language learning we should focus our efforts on the general conditioning for example listening broadly in the beginning as a beginner but as we progress into the intermediate and advanced phases of our learning as we progress and we want to start speaking and outputting more we need to be much more specific on how we

speak so that it aligns with our goals if your studies are unorganized and General your results are going to be unorganized in general this means to stop trying to learn a ton of different topics all at once this means that you need to focus your efforts and you're learning on a particular topic or else you're just spreading yourself thin you're wasting your time so unlike listening where you can go broad go wide right away with speaking when we enter that phase into phase two where we want to practice our speaking and improve our speaking we

need to learn deeply first and then go wide it's better to build local expertise in a focal specific topic and then once you build that local expertise and that local confidence then you can migrate to a new topic whereas if you just start wide and you start speaking about a lot of different topics you're going to spread yourself thin because of the many reasons that I mentioned before because it's so hard to to get speaking practice because speaking is so much more mentally taxing and it's harder to speak with other people it's hard to build

a speaking practice so you have to really focus and pinpoint that speaking specificity is this limiting of course it is but that's the point think of when you learn to ride a bicycle for the first time this is like putting limits by adding training wheels to your bicycle this is limiting your riding experience for example you can't go as fast you can't turn Corners as sharply but it's helping you build the fundamentals it's helping you build the basics so that when you take off the training wheels the limiting factors you're going to be able to

start doing TR bricks turning those sharp Corners you're going to start going faster but in order to do that it helps to limit the way that you're studying the way that you're learning so you're putting training wheels on you're limiting your topics so that you can go faster later okay but how do we do this many Learners try to improve their speaking by learning more vocabulary or more grammar lessons without practicing speaking but this is like putting a bandage on the problem it makes you feel better but you're not fixing the root problem accumulating vocabulary

is something that a lot of Learners do I see it all the time and it's not necessarily a bad thing if there is a goal you can think about vocabulary like tools in a toolbox it's useful but it's only useful when there's a problem when there's something that you're working towards when you're using the vocabulary to solve a particular problem to express and communicate a thought or an idea however what many people or what many Learners do is that they accumulate all this vocabulary and it makes them feel good it makes them think that okay

I'm learning more vocabulary today I know all this vocabulary but they're not applying that vocabulary and so it just gathers dust in their toolbox and eventually if they're not using it they're going to lose it and all of that vocabulary is just going to waste they're wasting their time and their effort their valuable time and effort when it could be focused on a particular topic on a particular purpose okay so you might be saying I get this I shouldn't be learning vocabulary all the time if I'm not using it but how do I apply that

vocabulary then what should I do instead of looking for vocabulary look for interesting problems to solve and the right vocabulary will reveal itself naturally so when I was in medical school when I was training to become a doctor one of the ways that we learned was through something called problem-based learning pbl for short problem-based learning has been shown in many studies to be more effective than lecture-based learning in improving knowledge social and communication skills problem solving self-learning and student satisfaction problem-based learning essentially at its core means that you're not just consuming information you're not just

sitting in a lecture room you're not just listening as we do with language learning which is important like I said listening and input is very important but the next step is to start applying it how do we apply it we use a problem to direct our learning problem based learning is essentially that you have a problem and in the case of language learning we can think about the problem as something that we want to talk about something that can direct the way that we learn vocabulary because before we have a problem we're just learning a

bunch of vocabulary without any direction once we have a problem something that we want to talk about something that we're passionate and interested in talking about then we have a direction and we can start heading towards that direction and learning the vocabulary on the way so all the vocabulary that we're learning is with purpose and it's not wasted time all of that is directed all of our energy and our efforts are directed to that specific problem this gives us something very tangible that we can see that we can think about that we can look forward

to and that we can play with here are some questions that help me look for interesting problems which topics am I passionate about and interested in are there questions that people ask me all the time are there topics that I often struggle to talk about is there a topic that I have a controversial opinion about if you struggle with speaking and I know a lot of you do because a lot of you guys said send me messages that you struggle with speaking you probably know the answer to these questions because often when I ask you

what do you struggle with speaking about you often tell me oh it's about this topic oh I have trouble talking with my friends oh I have trouble talking about politics or the news so you already know the problems or the topics that you have difficulty or that you want to improve in you already have an interesting problem to work towards the problem is that you're ignoring that you're procrastinating or that you're getting distracted by other problems by other topics that look shiny and interesting but it's not the problem that you need to be focusing on

remember languages and speaking at its core is a tool for communication it's not about how many compliments you get it's not about how beautiful or perfect your pronunciation or your tones are it's very important pronunciation and tones are important but after a certain point after you're able to communicate effectively with your pronunciation and tones it's not about making that perfect so that you sound like a native speaker sure that can be a goal of yours but I would say that most of us we just want to communicate our points effectively so it doesn't necessarily matter

how much vocabulary you know it's much more important to use that vocabulary even if it's small amount of vocabulary to communicate your point effectively and you can do that without knowing a ton of vocabulary one way I like to do that to help me keep myself in the frame is using the noun method what is the now method the biggest mistake I see Learners make is learning for the future they accumulate hord vocabulary for the future you learn phrases you won't use now you learn grammar points you won't use now you learn topics that are

not relevant to you now if this is you if this sounds like you stop doing this this is just wasting your time if you're just learning for fun and you don't really care about improving your speaking then by all means you can do this you can just learn as much vocabulary as you want you can learn all the vocabulary that is interesting to you but if you want to direct your learning and you want to make improvements if you're serious about making improvements in your speaking then you have to be very careful and strategic with

how you speak and how you practice your speaking you want to be very focused with your speaking practice so whenever I'm listening to podcasts in Mandarin or I'm watching videos in Mandarin I'm always asking myself these two questions can I see myself using this vocabulary in the next week do I want to talk about this topic soon these two questions put me in the frame of mind of now of whether I see myself applying this vocabulary or talking about this topic in the near future whether it's by myself recording myself speaking or whether it's with

a language partner my friends speaking Mandarin Chinese whether it's with my Chinese teacher this helps me get in the frame of not just accumulating vocabulary just for fun again if you want to do that just for fun be my guess but if you're serious about focusing your learning so that you make progress then you have to be strategic and so this is how I stay strategic this is how I focus my energy so I'm not wasting energy I'm not just accumulating tools in the toolbx that are just going to gather dust everything has an intention

this is the opposite of how we're taught in schools when we're just learning for exams and we're just cramming for the exam at the end of the year or maybe at the end of the semester we learn all this material for like 3 months 6 months and then we have to regurgitate all of that after the end of the semester or at the end of the year the best learning is not where we're cramming at the end just making a Mad Dash for the end the best learning comes from learning and applying what you learn

as quick as possible so having these almost many tests or many exams every day focus on now to minimize the time between learning a new phrase or vocabulary and using it the faster you apply what you learn the faster you consolidate and remember it everything else is a distraction another important Paradigm that helps me to shift from just understanding a language to understanding and speaking a language is to think about the environment that I'm immersing myself into we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with so it stands to reason

that the way we speak in our target language is the average of the five people we spend the most time with listening and speaking and so a common reason that I see that people can understand but they can't speak is because they're listening and they're getting too much input from too many sources too many people it's jumbling their mind it's confusing their brains and again you're spreading yourself thin the way to combat this the way to fix this is to think of someone in your target language let's say Mandarin Chinese and think about someone that

you enjoy listening to that you enjoy consuming their content for me there were two podcasts in Mandarin Chinese that I loved listening to and I still do but especially when I was early on in my language learning journey I just love listening to these podcasts so I would put them on put on my earphones and I would listen to them every day on repeat even if it was the same episode I would put myself in an immersive Zone where I was constantly getting the input but not from like hundreds of different podcasts I wasn't watching

tons of different creators I was focusing on the ones that I enjoyed listening to so think about your favorite creators it could be anything that you like about them maybe it's the sound of their voice maybe it's very calming and soothing for you maybe it's the fact that they're very insightful maybe it's the topics that they talk about maybe they're very funny pick a few creators pick a few speakers listen to them focus on them and ignore everything else the result of this when I started listening to these two podcasts is that quickly I started

picking up on their mannerisms I started picking up their accents and the way that they spoke because if you think about it if you're listening to the same speaker all the time they're often using the same vocabulary because usually most people they they say the same things over and over again and so this is a great way to get that rep ition spacing out your repetition in a natural way by just listening the fastest way to build momentum and progress with your speaking is to model your speaking after someone you resonate with and admire by

spending as much time as you can with them listening or speaking you're going to naturally start picking up their mannerisms and the vocabulary that they use and even the sound the their their accent just as we naturally pick up words and even change our accents when we travel or start living in a new country it's the same thing we're naturally humans are like sponges we're just naturally good at absorbing our environments it makes us feel safe it makes us feel part of a community it makes us not feel like we're standing out and sticking out

like a sore thumb so pick someone who you enjoy listening to and stick with them try not to get distracted by all the other noise all the other creators all the other podcasts out there just try to stick with one for a long time and you'll be very surprised like I was by how much progress you make in your listening comprehension but also your speaking okay this is all great advice but how do I structure my learning and how can you use all of this to consolidate all of this and structure your learning so that

you learn faster you break free from that plateau of just listening and only understanding and not speaking so that you can start understanding and speaking so this is the study routine that I use to learn to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese after many years five years of trial and error I keep it very simple with only three essential steps number one I pick a problem so like I mentioned problem based learning I always pick a problem and I ask myself these questions and this can be a question that people ask me all the time a topic

that I'm interested in right now a topic I had difficulty expressing myself in the past or an interesting idiom or vocabulary I learned recently number two I figure out what I want to say and again I'm using prompts to help me with this so once I have the problem once I have a topic in mind that I can direct my learning then I figure out what I want to say and the easiest way to do this is just to start for example pick someone like I mentioned a language role model that you want to model

you're speaking after and start listening to them around this topic so often I'm listening to podcasts throughout the day while I'm walking while I'm doing the chores passively doing other things in the background and I'm repeating this so I'm getting immersion but I'm also getting the space repetition from again that language role model that I want to model my speaking after and while I'm listening I'm picking out new vocabulary that I want to learn so that the new vocabulary is not just random vocabulary that I may or may not use it's very directed and it's

very relevant to what I want to speak about what how I want to apply this in my life in my conversations and while I'm listening I'm also shadowing and I'm mimicking the native speakers because again this is someone that I want to model my speaking after I like their accent I like the way they sound I like the way they articulate themselves so I'm modeling myself I'm mimicking myself I'm shadowing them while they're speaking but also while I'm learning this vocabulary I'm thinking I'm imagining myself putting myself in the position of having a conversation I

imagine myself someone asking me a question in real life and I'm imagining myself using this vocabulary or thinking putting myself in that position so that I have to force myself to use that vocabulary and thinking if I can use that vocabulary and then I'll think to myself I'll talk to myself using the vocabulary and this helps me put myself in the position of actually have a conversation because visualization is is so important I mean like all the elite athletes in the world in the Olympics they all use visualization to help them put themselves in the

moment when the real experience is happening but this can help you to simulate that real life situation without the consequences this makes the practice much more real and much more practical much more realistic instead of just feeling like a homework assignment okay so once I figured out what I want to say I figured out the vocabulary I want to learn then number three the last step is just to apply what I'm learning by speaking and this can be usually talking to myself throughout the day I can be walking and talking to myself or often what

I like to do is record myself speaking because this adds a little bit of pressure again with the visualization technique this makes it seem like or it makes it simulate the real experience much more closely there's a little bit of pressure because something is filming me so that I think okay there's someone at the other on the other end of this so I have to speak at least with a little bit of pressure and then fin finally the other option is to practice with a language exchange with a friend who speaks your target language or

with a teacher so in my case a Chinese teacher so I do these three things every single day I pick a problem I figure out what I want to say and then I say it I apply what I learn by speaking how often do I do this well throughout the day I'm constantly doing step one and two so I'm constantly listening to Native material again while I'm doing things passively on the side and I don't have to be actively engaged but sometimes I'm you know shifting in and out of active engagement and active listening but

while I'm listening I'm already doing step two and then step one is just thinking about the problem but step one is actually easy because while I'm listening throughout the day I'm getting new ideas I'm getting new problems that I can collect and save for the next day so for the next day I don't have to think about oh what what am I going to talk about today I already have a list I collect a list of problems or topics or idioms that I want to talk about the next day so I'm not wasting wasting time

looking for topics or material to learn about I already have a collection of them and then I only set aside time for step three this is time that I actually have to be actively engaged in like I mentioned speaking is something that I have to actively engage in but it's not that much time like you can set aside one minute per day this is what I typically do I give myself the expectation I just want to speak for one minute oftentimes I speak more than that but I'm only giving myself the expectation of speaking for

one minute on most say this is this is me just recording myself speaking in my target language Mandarin Chinese or if I don't have time for even that then I'm just talking to myself while I'm doing other things and then once or twice a week I actually schedule in time with my Chinese teacher because this is the perfect time after I've practiced speaking with myself and I've recorded myself this is the perfect opportunity to practice it in a safe environment with a language partner with language teacher to actually apply what I've been learning it sounds

super simple because it is I'm eliminating all the extra effort all the extra time all the extra energy and I'm directing all my energy on only vocabulary that I want to learn that I want to apply that I want to talk about everything else is a distraction this way I'm building up progress faster I'm building up momentum faster I'm building up my speaking confidence faster because I'm building local confidence I'm building local expertise so that when I feel confident in this area I can move on to the next area and it slowly builds gradually instead

of spreading myself thin and then feeling overwhelmed and then Giving Up So if you're a learner who understands but can't speak I hope this video helps you guys if you're learning Chinese check out my free speaking template below where I show you exactly how to build a speaking habit you can also check out the copypaste speak system where I show you step by step how I learn to speak like native shines speakers like share and subscribe thanks for watching guys see you guys next time bye