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[Two Words]

When people say that they can't speak it, but can understand it, they're not saying that they can understand it at the same level they speak it.

This comes down to fundamental differences in memory and cognition for our brains' ability to recall information, or to recognize it. Generally, recall is harder than recognition, and in Second Language Studies terminology, it's part of the difference of "Production" vs. "Comprehension".

When you produce language, you have to know all of the words that are coming out of your mouth, and recall the vocabulary and syntax that form your sentence. When you passively listen to and comprehend a language, you don't necessarily need to know 100% of the vocab and syntax of any given sentence, because as long as you catch most of it, you can probably infer the general meaning.

I get that. But I feel like the aspect of time is being completely ignored by everybody else. Isn't this essentially recalling with a lot of time vs recognition with very little time?

I've been told my experience is common for beginners, but I've been studying for a bit over a year now and it's a problem that still lurks with me.

 

[Rentahamster]

OP, the next time you have a conversation with a bilingual Spanish/English person, try this experiment.

Scenario 1: You talk in English, and your partner talks in Spanish.

Scenario 2: You talk in Spanish, and your partner talks in English.

Let us know which one you have an easier time with.

 

[V_Arnold]

I have yet to learn japanese, but I can understand whole sentences and many, many words. It is not a rare thing, OP:

Learning the language is way harder than picking up a lot from it.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Personally, I'm E-F bilingual, have been since I was 5. But it's been a few years since I've spoken French with regularity, and so often times when I speak, it's slower, more pronounced, and more deliberate--with grammatical and noun-gender issues. My reading comprehension is still fluent, and my oral comprehension is still fluent, but my speech has slowed.

So a few years ago when I took graduate political philosophy instructed in French, I found I didn't participate as much in class and when I did I had to struggle to get my point across. It's a subject where in general it's hard to get your point across, but it was especially hard for me. The same people who were most fluent in that class were more abrupt and halting or less sophisticated when they took classes instructed in English. I had to ask people if I was using the right words ("heat wave" in french: canicule or vague de chaleur? which context would you use which? If I heard a french speaker use either I'd translate to English no problem). I had to read off prepared notes more often. I was less able to add stuff to my statements on the fly--if I thought of something mid-sentence, I couldn't put it in the way I could in English

Does this make no sense? I speak French, and I can understand it, but I certainly understand it better than I speak it.

 

[Two Words]

OP, the next time you have a conversation with a bilingual Spanish/English person, try this experiment.

Scenario 1: You talk in English, and your partner talks in Spanish.

Scenario 2: You talk in Spanish, and your partner talks in English.

Let us know which one you have an easier time with.

Well I can already tell you for sure that scenario 2 is much easier for me. I experience it constantly. I've had enough moments where scenario 1 and 2 happen, maybe not sequentially, and scenario 2 is always far easier for me.

 

[alekth]

There are plenty of languages that fit these criteria for me. None of them is a language I have studied though, at least not for something more than two weeks. They are just related, and when you know a couple of languages, understanding others is easier. (some getting used to pronunciation is necessary though, if you haven't heard much of the language before, and it sounds very different from what you speak)

 

[CitizenVectron]

A lot of people here seem to not be reading the OP. I am not talking about understanding some text from a foreign language. I'm talking about a person claiming that they can listen to two people talk in a foreign language, understand what they are saying as they speak in real time, but that person cannot really speak any of the language at all even when given all the time they might need.

Here's why: Because when we hear a word we can cycle very quickly through the sounds and match up what it might mean. So using a (fake) example, let's say the word for elephant in another language was 'elephkent.' If I knew the conversation was about animals I would probably assume they meant elephant. But if I didn't know the word for elephant and someone asked me to say it, how would I know where to even begin?

When we hear things and as long as we understand the basic context of the situation (and also body language helps), we can fill in quite a few blanks.

Creation needs memorization, while understanding only needs a framework and enough experience to be able to guess accurately.

 

[Blargonaut]

I understand Tagalog fully and fluently, but if you asked me to speak to you in Tagalog back, my mind goes completely blank in the attempt to form a sentence with correct grammar and even words.

What comes out will most likely be a broken string of random words, but if you were to say the correct version to me, it would click and I'd kick myself wondering why I didn't say that even though I inherently know that was the correct version. It's like one-way glass.

It turns into a struggle to mentally translate the words of my response from English to Tagalog, because I was raised in a family where my parents spoke full Tagalog to each other, but English to me, and I was never pressured to speak in Tagalog back. I understood both worlds but never really participated in the other. I guess that's where my mental block stems from.

 

[DonasaurusRex]

its common, i understand japanese very well and can write and read it , but since i dont use it all the time it takes a few days to use it orally if im in japan.

 

[You Are Viewtiful]

OP, you're learning wrong. You can speak but not understand it when someone says the exact same sentence? That's crazy. You should watch more telenovela. With all the exaggerated drama you'll be able to join the "understand, but don't speak" club.

 

[Rentahamster]

I get that.

Wait, you get it? That in general, production is harder than comprehension? Then what's the purpose of your original post?

But I feel like the aspect of time is being completely ignored by everybody else. Isn't this essentially recalling with a lot of time vs recognition with very little time?

What? What do you mean? I'm using the same time constraint for both scenarios. If you take forever to make a sentence, that does alleviate some of the difficulty of production, but that's not how actual conversations work. I'm talking real, back and forth conversations.

 

[B-Dubs]

I get that. But I feel like the aspect of time is being completely ignored by everybody else. Isn't this essentially recalling with a lot of time vs recognition with very little time?

I've been told my experience is common for beginners, but I've been studying for a bit over a year now and it's a problem that still lurks with me.

Not really, comprehension can happen very quickly. You don't even necessarily have to realize it's happened. Have you ever seen a problem and known how to solve it without needing to think about it? You may not know the answer right away but you recognize the different parts that make up the problem and know what they mean. This is the same idea.

 

[jamesinclair]

I can understand a song.

I cant sing for shit.

Its the same thing.

And think of vocabulary. Youre telling me youve never been at a loss for a specific word and when you hear it you go "THATS IT!"?

 

[Resident_UA]

Yeah, I don't see what your issue is. I understand probably 80% of polish, but I can barely say two words. Because that language is similar to Ukrainian I can guess what people are saying to me, but there's no way for me to guess what I'm trying to say... It has to be somewhat correct.

 

[Spongebob]

My understanding of my home tounge (Nigerian language) is very good, but my oral skills are lacking because I rarely ever speak it.....it's a real thing.

 

[sir_kevith]

Do you think babies don't have any understanding of mommy and daddy until all of the sudden the baby can talk?

 

[MJPIA]

I can't speak Japanese at all (Disclaimer: I can't even speak my native language English the greatest either, stumble and trip over far too many simple words) but I can somewhat decipher and understand stuff people are speaking.
I can watch unsubbed anime if I need to and I'll get the gist of what they are saying.
Its not perfect but its good enough.
I frequent a Asian supermarket near me and I am able to mostly understand what some of the workers who don't speak English are saying.
Watching subbed anime is the reason I know what I know and is also why I can't speak it, I listen to Japanese with subtitles and over the years gained any knowledge of Japanese I have from that, I have never taken any lessons and am incapable of pronouncing pretty much anything from the Japanese language.

 

[Raonak]

I used be super fluent in fiji-hindi when I grew up in fiji, it was my main language.
but I moved to NZ at the age of 8, and learned english, it became my main language, as I didn't have much people to talk english to.

Fast forward 15 years, and I'm terrible at speaking hindi, I have to actively think about translating english words into hindi. And for most words, i don't know the translation.

BUT, I my parents speak hindi, and I can almost perfectly understand them. I'm not actively translating it in my mind. they say a sentence in hindi, and I know exactly what it means. It's weird, i'm not even thinking about it. It's quite funny having a dual langauge conversation, where my parents are talking hindi, and im talking english.


tl;dr - recalling a memory is far harder than being reminded of a memory.

 

[gutter_trash]

languages of the same family share lots of similarities,
the one that is phoneticly easier to pick has greater chances of getting understood.

one of the many reasons why many claim that Spanish is the easier Romance language to understand, pick-up and go by with.

Portuguese however has lots of sounds, vowels dipping or dropping off, make it harder to pick up phonetically of the cusp.

But in Spanish, every letter written is pronounced and heard

 

[Rentahamster]

Well I can already tell you for sure that scenario 2 is much easier for me. I experience it constantly. I've had enough moments where scenario 1 and 2 happen, maybe not sequentially, and scenario 2 is always far easier for me.

Forgive me, but I'm a little skeptical of that.

Possible causes:

You are using different metrics to judge speaking skill vs. listening skill, and thus speaking skill appears to be greater than listening skill.

Your conversation partner was using Spanish at a level much too high for your comprehension, so of course you wouldn't understand much of it. However, you are still speaking at the level you understand (how could you not), so your speaking skill appeared to be greater than your listening.

Your speaking ability still involves a lot of canned, or set, phrases, which don't require as much mental work as putting together smaller details and more specific words and abstract ideas in a sentence that you've probably never uttered before.

 

[RM8]

But in Spanish, every letter written is pronounced and heard

Phonemic languages FTW <3

 

[Simplet]

As I've been learning Spanish, I haven't had much trouble retaining words that I have already learned. It doesn't happen often where I am lost for how to say a word for too long. However, basically whenever somebody speaks to me in Spanish, I find it incredibly difficult to parse every word they said and construct it's meaning fully. Essentially what happens in my head is that I am taking in every word they say in real-time, translating that word, and reconstructing it into an English sentence. Sometimes I don't do all that for smaller stuff, but the longer sentence I used in the OP is an example of one what I could not retain the full meaning in my head in Spanish. Where I get lost is when I either cannot understand what they said because I can't parse the sound they were making or perhaps I have a moment of forgetfulness on a particular word or they used a word I've never heard of and I have to quickly use context clues to figure out what that means. Doing this in real-time causes me to fall behind, and during the time I was translating, I stopped listening to them and they just said several other words I didn't hear at all. This problem doesn't exist for me when speaking Spanish because I simply pause to properly construct the sentence in my head.

That's because :

1. Your vocabulary is really small, so you spend your time drilling in your head a few hundred words, making it easier to keep them in your active memory. When you get more advanced and you have tens of thousands of words in your passive memory, it's really hard to retrieve the word you're looking for at will.

2. You're not trying to have actual conversations, which is what those people you talk about in the OP mean when they say that they can't "speak a language". If someone was talking to you in real time and you had to process everything they said and then formulate an coherent and relevant answer quickly enough for them not to lose patience with you, you would probably also tell them that you "can't speak". It's really easy to see how that is harder than just understanding what they say.

3 You're not at a level where using the grammar is bothering you too much, because you're only making basic sentences anyway.

4 You have so little vocabulary that collocations are still not a problem for you at ths point. Did you know that in chinese you "construct" a building but you "cover" a house? You'll be trying to make a seemingly easy sentence and then suddenly you can't remember the verb for "making a house", even though your chinese is good enough that you know that "construct" is not it. You're stumped. If you were hearing this sentence you would recognize the words "cover" and "house" and you could guess the meaning even if you didn't know the actual expression. Multiply this by countless stuck phrases, fixed expressions and apparently nonsensical ways of speaking (why do you park in a driveway but drive in a parkway?), and you have an idea how much more difficult speaking is than understanding.

 

[LCfiner]

I’m like this with Spanish. I can understand it nearly perfectly but I can’t seem to speak it. I always hit a roadblock just trying to conjugate a verb. awful

 

[Maximus.]

It is absolutely true, you may have grown up at an early age speaking and hearing a language, but moved away from speaking it. That leaves you with being able to understand what is being spoken, but you do not practice speaking. That isn't to say you forget how to put together some sentences, but not everything is easy to replicate.

It is hard to believe that if you are studying a language, but that is a different situation on its own.

 

[Sylver]

I'm in this situation, I can understand, listen and read english but I'm the worst speaking and writing it.

 

[Meier]

I was always this way with Spanish when I was learning it in school. I could understand things but really struggled when I had to speak back (not necessarily in class where there was less difficulty in the expectation from the teacher, but just trying to be conversational). It's easier to recognize the words you know and to use context to help with those you don't than it is to reproduce them. I think for many people there's a level of fear in sounding stupid.

 

[Loofy]

Im this way.

For me its like this. Can I read and understand shakespeare? sure. If someone asked me to write like shakespeare could I do it? maybe.. but it would take a really long time and I dont think I can hold a conversation in Shakespearean. Hell I have to stop english conversations sometimes cause I cant remember the word Im looking for.

 

[Kazerei]

I'm learning Spanish in my free time, and actually being able to speak particular phrases or in the correct grammar comes way before understanding it for me.

I think this would hold for most, if not all, languages because the learner speaking the language can construct the sentence at their own pace, but listening requires you to keep up to the speaker's pace.

I understand what you mean. Normally you have to learn what "donde" means and how to say it before you can listen and understand it.

But I think a lot of people in this thread have a completely different learning experience than you. We've learned by being immersed in the language and listening to it A LOT, especially at a young age. As a result, we can listen and understand but we have trouble speaking the language.

My parents have always spoken Cantonese to me since I was born, so I've never had a problem listening and understanding it. But I had to put effort in to the pronunciation and recalling vocabulary. I've listened to some Mandarin here and there that I can kind of understand it, but there's no way I can really speak it.

 

[Jeff-DSA]

I'm fluent in English and Spanish but I can understand other languages when they're spoken to me. It's not hard to translate incoming speech, but to form it in my head, that's harder. I could communicate at a very basic level in multiple languages, but I can understand a lot of what's said to me.

When learning Spanish I understood it 100% before I could speak at a competent level.

 

[Coinspinner]

I grew up in a Spanish speaking household but by middle school I was allowed to just speak English around my family who also spoke it. I only really needed Spanish around elderly relatives. I can understand conversational Spanish and read it, but when I try to speak or write it I fail to recall a lot of necessary words.

It is is easier to recall a word when you hear it as opposed to knowing the meaning or part of speech you need and having to find the word. There is a mental mechanism that I'm not exercising when I don't have to actually speak the language.

 

[Always-honest]

I think it's possible. Cause i experienced it.

 

[equippedwithtowel]

My French pronunciation is shit from lack of practice and general anglo accent but I can read and write it fairly well so understanding naturally flows from that.

Personally, I'm E-F bilingual, have been since I was 5. But it's been a few years since I've spoken French with regularity, and so often times when I speak, it's slower, more pronounced, and more deliberate--with grammatical and noun-gender issues. My reading comprehension is still fluent, and my oral comprehension is still fluent, but my speech has slowed.

So a few years ago when I took graduate political philosophy instructed in French, I found I didn't participate as much in class and when I did I had to struggle to get my point across. It's a subject where in general it's hard to get your point across, but it was especially hard for me. The same people who were most fluent in that class were more abrupt and halting or less sophisticated when they took classes instructed in English. I had to ask people if I was using the right words ("heat wave" in french: canicule or vague de chaleur? which context would you use which? If I heard a french speaker use either I'd translate to English no problem). I had to read off prepared notes more often. I was less able to add stuff to my statements on the fly--if I thought of something mid-sentence, I couldn't put it in the way I could in English

Does this make no sense? I speak French, and I can understand it, but I certainly understand it better than I speak it.

Much more thorough explanation of where I'm at.

 

[markot]

Understanding a language is easier if you understand a few words. Those tend to 'pop out' at you and you can then piece together what the other person is saying.

But then being able to use those few words to string together a sentence becomes difficult.

And generally this is from people who were immersed in a language but are no longer, you forget things if you dont use them, but you remember bits, and this is mainly for children.

 

[BPoole]

I understand Spanish much better than I can speak it. My vocabulary is limited, but I can usually identify words as they speak and out together a narrative that makes more sense to me.

 

[Vermillion]

Etymology will usually help you in related languages.

This.

In many cases I can hear/read words that are similar to those I already know and deduce their meaning. Doesn't mean I could have come up with the words on my own.

 

[RMI]

I understand spanish very well, having grown up with spanish speaking parents and grandparents, and I can speak it some, but I wouldn't call myself fluent at all. When I visit home it's very common for my parents to speak to me in Spanish and I respond in English, it's easier for them and easier for me.

reading the OP's bus example, it would be far easier for me to understand somebody asking me that question than it would be for me to ask them.

 

[Auron_Kale]

A lot of people here seem to not be reading the OP. I am not talking about understanding some text from a foreign language. I'm talking about a person claiming that they can listen to two people talk in a foreign language, understand what they are saying as they speak in real time, but that person cannot really speak any of the language at all even when given all the time they might need.

The thing is, I was never taught to speak Tagalog at all in my house. Hell, my only cousins who can speak the language were born in the Philippines. Myself, I was the first of my family born here in the US, so again, my parents chose to speak English to me over teaching me to speak Tagalog. My younger cousins that are also born in the US are the same way - we weren't taught to speak the language.

Any words that I can say are usually food related, since that's just what I know. But I honestly can't speak the language at all and can't read it either.

 

[AlexBasch]

I barely understand some Americans when talking.

And since I haven't practiced spoken english because LOL BEANER or WETBACK in online gaming, my speech skills are a bit underwhelming, IMO.

So yeah, I have a better grasp at reading text than listening to some people if their way of talking is strange to me. I have no issues understanding James Rolfe or JonTron in their vids, for example, but some movies without subtitles are a no go for me sometimes.

My hearing is improving, but I'm still bad sometimes.

 

[Cheebo]

It's much easier to understand a language than to speak it. It's a well known fact. No idea why this needed a thread?

 

[Frodo]

A lot of people here seem to not be reading the OP. I am not talking about understanding some text from a foreign language. I'm talking about a person claiming that they can listen to two people talk in a foreign language, understand what they are saying as they speak in real time, but that person cannot really speak any of the language at all even when given all the time they might need.

Languages like Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, and even French for that matter, have a lot of things in common, so if you speak one you probably can understand a few things of the others to a certain degree. I can understand Spanish pretty well, although I can only speak a few very basic sentences. You don't need to understand it perfectly to make sense of it. If you understand the important words your brain will probably fill in the rest for you. Maybe not correctly, but you will have an idea of what is being said.

 

[Earendil]

if someone gives me a french text i can mull over it for a few minutes and eventually figure put what it says but don't ask me to actually speak french because i could never think up what to say so instantly

"Je ne comprend pas" is the answer to everything.

 

[Great King Bowser]

It's called Passive Language Competence.

I for one am passive competent in Vietnamese. I can understand most conversation I listen to, or at least infer the meaning by hearing specific keywords but not necessarily understanding each and every word.

I find this thread very strange.

 

[Syriel]

I hear this so often from people whenever the topic turns to other languages and I've grown more and more skeptical of this claim. How is this even possible? I'm learning Spanish in my free time, and actually being able to speak particular phrases or in the correct grammar comes way before understanding it for me.

I took Russian in high school. Never got a real chance to use it past that.

I cannot just bust out Russian phrases on command. But if I hear things in a movie or when a co-worker occasionally speaks in Russian, I can still understand the basics.

 

[Avixph]

It can happen with mutually intelligible languages though. For example, I am a native Spanish speaker and I can understand almost all written Portuguese and at least get the main idea of oral Portuguese, and I haven't ever taken a lesson. But I can't speak nor write in Portuguese. And I'm sure it works the same way the other way around.

It's a common feature of mutually intelligible languages. I'm sure the same thing happens with Catalan and Occitan, for example, or Danish and Swedish, etc.

Wow me too.

 

[Moral Panic]

A lot of people here seem to not be reading the OP. I am not talking about understanding some text from a foreign language. I'm talking about a person claiming that they can listen to two people talk in a foreign language, understand what they are saying as they speak in real time, but that person cannot really speak any of the language at all even when given all the time they might need.

You don't need to understand 100% of the words to understand a sentence.

If I hear a sentence and can pick out -> "Myself, long day, tired, dinner, when" I can get the understanding of the sentence, whereas when speaking I have to think up the tense, conjugation, word order and the correct vocabulary for what I want to say all in the few seconds before I'm expected to answer.

 

[Kurita]

As a student of Japanese I can tell you I can understand/recognise speech better than I can speak it. Continue to be a skeptic I guess.

Yup!

 

[davepoobond]

root words and such.

 

[Ray Wonder]

Op, have you ever forgotten a word, or a name, and when someone said it.

You said, "Ohh yeah, now I remember."

That's kind of how listening to a language that you kinda know is.

 

[nOoblet16]

Uh what's so confusing about it?

My parents speak a language I can't speak because I've never practiced it, if I speak I tend to forget words and my grammar will is completely inaccurate but when they speak I understand the completely because I myself don't have to come up with those words nor do I have to care about the grammar. In fact even with English, if you were to speak to me today you'd think I am a Londoner as I use received pronunciation but I have been here for only 5 years and I lived in India before that. Before coming to here to Britain my English speaking skills were below average, but my writing skills were equal to that of a native speaker because I did my entire education from Kindergarten in English, the reason why I was bad at speaking was because I barely conversed in English even in school except for when speaking to my tutors during classes but outside of classes we'd revert back to our native language.

It's pretty common in bi/multi lingual families...

 

[Ivieto]

So OP, you are learning Spanish. You want to say "How are you?" in Spanish.

How, is pretty simple -> Como

To be, is one verb in English but in Spanish it can be ser o estar. Ok, you quickly remember it is estar.

Are you speaking to one person or to a group? What is the proper conjugation for both cases?

OK, so you are speaking to a single person. Will you treat him as tu, vos o ud? WIll he/she be offended if you chose the wrong one? What is the proper conjugation in the style you chose?

Do you add a pronoun after the verb? If you do, it is more formal, do you want to sound formal or informal? Should the sentence be gendered as it is usually the case in Spanish?

On the other hand, you are sitting down and someone comes over and says: "Como estas?" Tell me that is harder than the first case.