Why You Understand A Language But Can’t Speak It

A learner recently asked me this question:

“Olly, I've been doing this reading and listening thing for a couple of years in Japanese and it really works. In my case, what happened is that I can read the newspaper but I can't speak. And I'm not sure how to bridge that gap.“

First of all, great job for being able to read the newspaper in Japanese. That is no mean feat. I can tell that you must have spent a long time on your comprehension, learning Chinese characters and so on. So, good job.

It's also completely understandable why you can't have a confident conversation in Japanese. If you can understand a language but can't speak it, there's a very good reason for this – and it's fixable.

If you prefer watching videos to reading, hit play on the video version of this post at the top of this page. Otherwise, here's what you'll discover in this article:

How We Learn Our First Language

Let's start by thinking about how we learn languages ourselves – our first language.

From when we are born until we can actually speak with any degree of confidence, it's somewhere between three to five years. And during this time, what happens?

Well, we are just immersed in the language. We have what's called comprehensible input. We have our parents reading stories to us. We're surrounded by friends. We spend years and years just comprehending, soaking things up.

The net result is that we can understand before we can speak.

I was with my nephew who's about one year old last week, and it just reminded me of this situation. He was desperate to talk and he could understand. You tell him to do this or not do that or high five – he could understand everything. But he couldn't speak yet.

Obviously, part of this is down to developmental stages of a human being. But let's plant a flag in this point: it's completely normal to understand but not be able to speak yet.

Also, in the case of my nephew, he can understand but obviously can't read yet. That comes later.

Getting to the point where you can actually listen, read, speak and write with a real degree of competency – it takes the best part of ten years. And at any given point, your skills are developing at different rates.

Why Adults Jettison Everything They Know

When it comes to learning a foreign language, for some reason there's a tendency to jettison everything we know about how we learn our first language.

We say, “No, we are smart, educated adults. We should be able to learn a language a lot faster.” And so we start looking for shortcuts.

But if we look around for any evidence of adults being able to learn languages faster – such as the school system, for example, or language schools where people spend many years trying to learn languages – the success rate is abysmal.

For me, our starting point is this: we all have a 100% success rate at learning one language, so we should look to that for guidance about how a second language should be learned.

This is one of the reasons I teach learning through reading, learning through stories. Yes, that's also how we started learning as babies. But that's not the main point.

The main point is that before you can speak, you have to know things.

What You Actually Need To Know

It sounds really obvious, but you can't speak or have a confident conversation in a foreign language until you know things. And there are two parts to this.

First, you have to know enough to be able to say stuff. But you also have to understand enough to process the reply when it comes back at you. So there are two core skills here: speaking and listening.

Underneath this is all this knowledge.

You have to:

• know words and phrases
• be able to decode grammar
• be able to pronounce words properly
• have an understanding of the social context – particularly in Japan, where much goes unspoken in the first place

In order to be able to speak, there is a prerequisite: we must develop our knowledge first.

Now, often in the language learning world you get people who make a bit of a party trick out of going and learning to speak really quickly.

They say, “Oh, I learned a language in two weeks” or “I learned a language in a month.” In reality, all they do is memorise a bunch of phrases, go out and use them, and everyone's like, “Wow, that's amazing.”

But then they don't understand what comes back, and they certainly couldn't pick up a book and read it. It's a very empty demonstration of language skills because it's only part of the equation.

The Pathway From Comprehension To Conversation

So what does it look like to go from not speaking a language to being able to speak it?

Step one is to learn a lot of stuff. And for the questioner, this is what you've been doing for the last couple of years. You now know a hell of a lot of stuff, and that's fantastic.

Now, it's also possible that the stuff you've learned is kind of written Japanese. This happens a lot. If you spend your whole time reading novels or newspapers, that's actually a different kind of Japanese to what tends to be spoken.

But let's park that because it's not the core of the point.

What we know for sure is that you know a lot in Japanese, which is great. But you haven't spent time actually activating it.

And the core point I always repeat about speaking in a foreign language is this: if you want to get good at speaking a foreign language, if you want to learn to speak fluently, that is the result not only of knowing a lot of stuff, but of actually doing a lot of speaking.

It's not the case that you study and study and study, wait till you're ready, and then suddenly emerge into the world completely fluent and fully formed.

No – what you need to do is go out and spend as much time practising speaking as you did reading and listening in the first place.

Speaking Is A Skill

Think about playing tennis. You could watch videos of the great tennis players and learn how to serve and learn the rules of the game.

But until you've actually done a thousand serves, you don't have any of the physiological understanding of what that actually involves – the feeling in your body, how to adjust for the wind, the gaze of your opponent down the opposite end of the court.

Speaking is just like this. You have to know the words. You have to be able to manipulate grammar.

But you also have to be able to square off against another human, look at them in the eyes, understand when they want to say something so you have to pull back. You make mistakes and you have to recover. There's so much that goes into speaking.

So the fundamental problem here is that you simply haven't spent enough time speaking.

My Own Transformation In Japan

I had this exact problem when I lived in Japan, back around 2010 or 2011. I had also spent a couple of years studying Japanese. I'd been taking classes, going through textbooks, using flashcards – all of these things.

And I had exactly the same problem. I would go to speak to someone and there were two issues.

First, I couldn't get the words out properly. Second, my comprehension wasn't that strong, so I would kind of panic whenever I got a response back. You might be familiar with this experience yourself.

There came a point when I was in Tokyo and I said to myself, “Look, this is no good. This doesn't make any sense at all.” I decided to go hell for leather and do a classic Olly thing – be as stubborn as possible and just not rest until I'd cracked this particular chestnut.

I rationalised in my mind: the only thing I haven't done this whole time is a lot of speaking. So let's stop the studying altogether and now do nothing but speaking.

I started arranging language exchanges. I didn't take classes because I'd done a bunch of those, and Japanese teachers – well, most language teachers, but especially in Japan – are very rigid. There's not a lot of conversation that goes on.

So I said, “Right, let's stop with the study. Let's stop with the lessons. I'm just going to go and speak.”

The Language Exchange Experiment

I arranged language exchanges as often as I could. I'd finish work and go to a language exchange – we'd spend an hour speaking English, an hour speaking Japanese. I did that for weeks on end.

What I found was that incredibly quickly, after two or three weeks, I'd gone from being really quite anxious speaking Japanese – because I'd conditioned myself to expect it to all go wrong – to being very confident in speaking.

And it wasn't because I'd learned a bunch of new stuff, although I had. It's more that I had the confidence to navigate key features of a conversation:

• the way that actual conversations in Japanese tend to go
• the phrases that people say
• the way that people work their way through a conversation in Japanese, which is quite unique.

I also developed the confidence in that time to listen to the reply that comes back and to not panic – to process it, give it my best guess and carry on the conversation.

It was, I think, in all my language learning, one of the most amazing transformations I remember ever seeing – going from being a bit of a shambles speaking to being quite confident in the period of just three weeks.

After three or four months, my Japanese had completely transformed. It was an amazing experience that came from one thing: I already had the knowledge in my head somewhere.

All I needed to do was get so much practice that it just became normal to me. Then the confidence came, and before I knew it I was just speaking Japanese on a regular basis. That's when you're away – you're off to the races at that point.

It's just like reading the newspaper every day – you get more and more confident reading the newspaper. When you start to speak every day, you get more and more confident at speaking. That's the way it goes.

How Can You Bridge The Gap?

So it is completely normal that one skill follows the next, and it's not something to worry about. But you do have to contend with the fact that you're not going to get good at something without practising it a lot.

One thing we have today in 2025 that we didn't have back when I was learning Japanese is access to AI tools. Now, I'm going to be clear: I absolutely think you should put the time in to find people you can speak with. These are tutors you could pay, or language partners.

But the other thing you can add into the mix is AI chat tools so you can actually practise speaking a language by yourself. It's hugely powerful in a situation like this where you're probably lacking confidence.

If you sit down and start using these AI tools for 30 minutes or an hour every day, you're going to start developing this muscle memory in your mouth. You're going to start the process of actively recalling the words you need.

So I would throw this into the mix. Find as many people as possible you can regularly practise speaking with. Make it a really big deal. Make it a priority.

If you want to pay tutors for their time for speaking practice, you can do that as well. And you can also use AI conversation tools to practise on a regular basis.

If you do these things and keep it up for a period of months, you won't believe how quickly you transform.

Understand A Language But Can't Speak It FAQ

Understand A Language But Can't Speak: The Bottom Line

If you can understand a language but can't speak it, here's what you need to know:

This gap between comprehension and speaking is completely normal. It mirrors how we learned our first language – understanding always comes before speaking.

The good news is that if you've built strong comprehension skills, you've already done the hard work of acquiring knowledge.

What's missing isn't more study. It's activation. Speaking is a skill that only improves through practice, just like serving in tennis or playing an instrument.

The solution is straightforward: stop waiting until you feel ready and start speaking as much as possible. Use language exchanges, hire tutors for conversation practice, and supplement with AI tools. Make speaking a daily priority for several months.

You already have the knowledge. Now it's time to use it.

Olly Richards

Creator of the StoryLearning® Method

Olly Richards is a renowned polyglot and language learning expert with over 15 years of experience teaching millions through his innovative StoryLearning® method. He is the creator of StoryLearning, one of the world's largest language learning blogs with 500,000+ monthly readers.

Olly has authored 30+ language learning books and courses, including the bestselling "Short Stories" series published by Teach Yourself.

When not developing new teaching methods, Richards practices what he preaches—he speaks 8 languages fluently and continues learning new ones through his own methodology.