You may have known someone who’s been studying a foreign language for a long time, yet for some reason doesn’t speak the language.
Who knows, that person could be you.
You study and study, immerse in foreign content, even feel emotions in the language you’re studying. Yet you couldn’t seem to get a hold of speaking for even the simplest of sentences.
But is it really possible to understand a language passively without speaking it? I think so.
Understanding a language requires obtaining lots of input through reading and listening, which don’t require speaking at all. Speaking, on the other hand, requires processing your thoughts, creating sentences, and practicing the mouth to articulate the language.
This means no matter how much input you take, you’re not guaranteed to learn speaking to the level you’d expect yourself to perform.
What’s going on here?
Understanding Without Speaking The Language: How It Works
Understanding the language, better known as comprehension, is doable without having to open your mouth. You acquire this ability either through reading or listening, provided you’re obtaining what is known as comprehensible input, which is input you can comprehend that’s not too hard.
As long as you’re familiar with the alphabet and the sounds of your target language, and that you regularly study grammar and vocabulary while also immersing in foreign content, your comprehension skills will naturally improve over time.
Speaking the language, as well as writing, is made up of several subskills. You first learn to process your thoughts and think what you want to say or write. Next, you tap into your bank of knowledge in the target language using vocabulary, grammar, and even cultural nuances to form the sentences you wish to communicate.
What sets speaking and writing apart is the medium. With writing, the sentences go towards a physical canvas, like a paper, digital note, chat box, or a Word document. With speaking, you use your mouth to articulate sentences properly and start a dialogue.
Reading and listening are input-based skills, while writing and speaking are output-based skills. Language learners start out with input in order to produce output. After all, you can’t order food in French if you haven’t encountered it during your French study.
However, you can choose not to produce output after accumulating a ton of input. For instance, I’m more interested in Korean shows, podcasts, articles, and books than with talking to natives or writing Korean articles. So I may decide to focus more on reading and listening.
The consequence to this is that my speaking and writing skills would fall behind. No matter how well-trained my eyes and ears are, it would not improve my Korean speaking because I’m not moving my mouth.
What About Speaking The Language Without Understanding It?
If you can choose to comprehend a language without speaking it, what about the other way around?
Speaking without understanding a language is possible and is actually the easier route to looking like a speaker of the language.
Learning a language is challenging because it’s hard work to be able to comprehend the language. It’s much easier to learn a couple of phrases and practice speaking it like a native.
To make it look convincing, you could learn the alphabet and sounds of the language in order to speak it flawlessly.
In short, it can be faked.
On the other hand, some people genuinely benefit from speaking without having to understand the language.
Take singers for example. They can sing foreign music if they want to, all they need is to learn the lyrics and the tune of the music. Or theater actors of a foreign play, they could memorize a script and sound like a natural speaker in the process.
However, you can’t expect these singers or actors to fully grasp what they’re talking about without relying on translation.
Which Is Better: Understanding More or Speaking More?
Clearly, having more understanding of your target language provides plenty of benefits for the effort you’re spending on it. Speaking is much easier to do, and it’s often what most people use to gauge your language ability.
But if you focus instead on silently absorbing lots of foreign language content, you might not get the recognition you deserve.
Ideally, you want to have the best of both worlds – being able to understand AND speak the language. The problem is that mastering a foreign language requires a ton of time and dedication to the process. You end up juggling all four skills: reading, writing, listening, speaking, which end up in unequal levels.
Obviously, this has to go back to your reason for learning the language to signal you which skill matters more: comprehension or production of the language.
Your personality is also a factor – you simply won’t speak lots if you’re an introvert, right?
A Nice Alternative to Speaking the Language
Eventually, you’ll need some way to practice speaking the language as you grow more in skill. But for those of you not yet willing to speak and step out of your comfort zone, there’s good news for you.
What you might want to do first is learn writing – an output-based skill which is less pressuring and allows you to think through your thoughts carefully.
There are several ways to get started today, including:
- Chatting with natives through apps like HelloTalk and Tandem
- Leaving comments on the target language forums
- Writing a post or article in the target language
- Having writing practice with a language tutor
- Handwriting the target language and get feedback
Whether you’re an introvert or not, you can begin writing even from day one. How cool is that?
Do you understand a foreign language even though you couldn’t speak it that fluently? Let me know in the comments.
