I Understand English but I Can't Speak It: Why This Happens and How to Fix It

So I really wanted to figure out why this is. When my students tell me “I understand everything, I just can’t speak,” my answers used to range from the obvious, “But you just said that in English” or technical, “English is easier to understand than to produce because of its dense phonology” to the practical, “Your voice is a muscle, let’s train it through conversation”. Really, there’s no single reason people feel tongue tied so I set out to find three real reasons this happens.

Reason 1: You’ve had more Input than Output

English is a global language. You hear it in films, music, at work, on the internet constantly. That gives your brain enormous amounts of comprehension practice. But productive skills are different, and they’re trained differently. You can recognize, and therefore know a word for years before you ever have to retrieve it under pressure.

Reason 2: Adult life is often more Socially Narrow

School life is all about pairing comprehensible input with natural expression. Say you’re French class takes a trip to Quebec, or you get a semester abroad in the middle of university. These kinds of trips allow students to acquire the goals they practiced for with instruction, workbooks, quizzes. Young adults are often able to afford unstructured travel, staying in hostel rooms and meeting international friends. Adults are still able to acquire a language socially though, in an even more effictive way. But before discussing those effective methods, the last reason language learners of all ages get tongue tied.

Reason 3: The Cognitive Filter

This is a rather old bit of theory that suggests that stress limits our social and cognitive skills. Later on, a SLA researcher named Stephen Krashen suggested that new language input turns on those same survival instincts. Even if you’re comfortable with reading or listening, hearing a new language can temporarily turn off your social skills.

Reason 3: [heading pending]

“I always understood my English coworkers perfectly. Speaking up in meetings was the hard part — that never came from watching more Netflix.” — Student first name, professional learner

Closing the gap between understanding and speaking

Ready to close this gap yourself? Book a lesson and start training the speaking half of the skill, not just the listening half.