“I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

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“I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby SpanishInput » Sat Nov 27, 2021 7:50 pm

Have you ever heard anyone say...

I understand everything, but I can’t speak”.

My humble opinion is that this common statement just can’t be true. If you have ever said it, try this:
  • Start watching a TV show or movie that was originally made in your target language. Turn off the captions.
  • Try to produce a fully accurate transcript of what’s being said. Use an extension such as Language Reactor, Glot Dojo or Migaku to help you repeat lines, if necessary.
  • Compare with the original captions.
  • Turns out you don’t “understand everything”, right? This is probably going to be an eye-opener for you. Write down your error rate somewhere so you can keep track of your progress.

Now, why is it the case that you believed you could “understand everything”, when that’s not the case? Maybe you have gotten used to only listening/reading for meaning, and just guessing the parts you don’t understand. This might have also caused common expressions and pesky little words such as prepositions, reflexive pronouns and direct/indirect object pronouns to fall between the cracks. IMHO, both your lack of ability to produce language and the fact that you don’t really understand everything have the same root: Your level of knowledge of the language is just not quite there yet, and you just need to keep learning. If you really could understand everything, then you should also be able to speak. After all, when you’re listening, you’re reconstructing an imperfect, incomplete signal. Listening is like taking a cloze deletion test: You’re filling the gaps with what you already know. That’s why for native speakers it’s so easy to complete each other’s sentences. Thanks to having a whole lifetime of input in a wide variety of contexts, they’ve developed a good ability to fill the missing pieces, and even predict what’s coming next. It is my humble opinion that engaging with the language in a more active way, even when doing receptive things such as listening, will help you with both listening and speaking.

BTW, by ‘speaking’ I mean producing language. I’m not talking about pronunciation, which is a whole different problem that you inevitably need to work on.

Now let's move on to another, related statement:

”Children of immigrants can perfectly understand the language of their parents, but can’t speak it”

I've seen people on Reddit and YouTube say something like this:

What about children of immigrants? How come they have a highly proficient understanding of their parent’s language but can’t speak it? In that situation it’s common that the children will be able to perfectly understand the language of their parents, but will have a varying ability to express themselves.”

The statement that these children can “perfectly understand the language of their parents” is easily disproved with the same transcription exercise I suggested above. I once talked to a child of Hispanic immigrants in the US who could not even handle a basic dictation exercise in simple, clearly spoken Spanish. Trying to transcribe a few minutes of any show from Spain or Latin America would have been impossible for her. So, despite her parents being Hispanic, she is far, far from “perfectly understanding the language of her parents”.

Why is this the case with children of immigrants?

My guess is that these children spend a lot more time talking to their school friends, attending lessons, watching TV, reading, playing games, using Tik Tok, listening to music, etc., all in English . Any input they get from their parents is a drop in a bucket in comparison. They get the lion’s share of their input from other sources. And when they do listen to their parents, it is usually about simple things such as housework, food, family or games. Science, history and literature are probably not among the topics their busy parents choose when they do try to speak with them in the language of their old country. Combine this with:

  • The fact that immigrants might encourage their children to prioritize the language of the new country.
  • The pressure immigrants themselves face to learn the language of the new country. They might even practice the new language with their children/grandchildren.
  • The language attrition experienced by the immigrant parents, who start to use words and structures from the new language to fill the gaps of things they’re forgetting in their native language.
  • The sad reality that immigrants and their children have experienced and continue to experience suspicion, discrimination, bullying and even outright racism when they speak the language of the old country.

“I can speak, but I can’t understand native speakers.”

This is another statement I’ve also seen online, and I believe it requires a great deal of honesty to say it. It’s relatively easy to learn a few basic sentence structures and a few tourist phrases. Even memorizing/reading a script in your target language and uploading a video on how you “learned X in Y days/months” is not that difficult. You can even fake understanding what other people are saying by relying on context, body language, and your knowledge of related languages or awareness of common cognates across different language families. But if you’re honest, you’ll have to admit you’re far away from understanding everything.

A needed clarification

I don’t believe input alone is enough. I believe some explicit instruction is necessary to point out certain things you might not notice in your input. And I’m not ‘married’ (as we say in Spanish) to any particular theory. I’m more in line with Deng Xiaoping’s famous line: “I don’t care if the cat is white or black, as long as it catches mice.”

What do you think? Have you ever said “I understand everything”? If that’s the case, did you try the transcription exercise in your target language(s)? Do you have any experience dealing with children of immigrants, or maybe you’re one yourself?
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby rdearman » Sat Nov 27, 2021 8:34 pm

No, but I have often heard it the other way around. "I can speak but can't understand the response."
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby M23 » Sat Nov 27, 2021 8:49 pm

I guess I wouldn't argue that someone could understand "everything" in a conversation, but that there is a gap in their ability to speak or write and understand a native speaker. For example, they might not be able to think of the word encontarse in Spanish (for example) to express meeting someone, but when a native speaker uses it they might be able to recognize the word and understand it. In fact, I have done that plenty of times (increasingly since the stroke) and have encountered people who could not produce a word but understood it once spoken.

Writing things down is also a bit hard if you are trying to do a program for adults. You might understand a word but not be able to extract it from the slurring and eating of sounds that makes up adult speech. For example, "to" instead of "todo" and "pa' 'ca" instead of "para áca." There is, of course, a litany of stuff that comes with coming from a particular country. Like Spaniards that use an "-ao" sound instead of saying "-ado," or a certain class of Mexicans who end practically every thought with "pues." Trying to transcribe things from this type of material would not be an example of something you didn't know, but would be more like trying to take something that you may or may not know and recognize it in a context.

There also an odd bit that I am not sure how you would classify, but ever since my stroke I can write in Spanish at one level but speaking is a few levels below what I can write at. It seems that with writing there is more time to ponder over what I am going to say, and make little corrections. When I am speaking, however, the time to make corrections is gone and I also encounter far more roadblocks to recalling words.
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby golyplot » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:38 pm

SpanishInput wrote:Have you ever heard anyone say...

I understand everything, but I can’t speak”.

My humble opinion is that this common statement just can’t be true. If you have ever said it, try this:
  • Start watching a TV show or movie that was originally made in your target language. Turn off the captions.
  • Try to produce a fully accurate transcript of what’s being said. Use an extension such as Language Reactor, Glot Dojo or Migaku to help you repeat lines, if necessary.
  • Compare with the original captions.
  • Turns out you don’t “understand everything”, right? This is probably going to be an eye-opener for you. Write down your error rate somewhere so you can keep track of your progress.

Now, why is it the case that you believed you could “understand everything”, when that’s not the case? Maybe you have gotten used to only listening/reading for meaning, and just guessing the parts you don’t understand. This might have also caused common expressions and pesky little words such as prepositions, reflexive pronouns and direct/indirect object pronouns to fall between the cracks. IMHO, both your lack of ability to produce language and the fact that you don’t really understand everything have the same root: Your level of knowledge of the language is just not quite there yet, and you just need to keep learning. If you really could understand everything, then you should also be able to speak. After all, when you’re listening, you’re reconstructing an imperfect, incomplete signal. Listening is like taking a cloze deletion test: You’re filling the gaps with what you already know. That’s why for native speakers it’s so easy to complete each other’s sentences. Thanks to having a whole lifetime of input in a wide variety of contexts, they’ve developed a good ability to fill the missing pieces, and even predict what’s coming next. It is my humble opinion that engaging with the language in a more active way, even when doing receptive things such as listening, will help you with both listening and speaking.

BTW, by ‘speaking’ I mean producing language. I’m not talking about pronunciation, which is a whole different problem that you inevitably need to work on.


I couldn't disagree more strongly with this.

First off, you're being a bit obtuse by interpreting colloquial language literally. Nobody ever understands literally everything in all circumstances, even in their own native language.

Second, it very well may be the case that an intermediate learner can produce a perfect transcript while listening to simple speech spoken clearly, and yet they would not be able to produce the same speech in a live conversation.

Lastly, your entire thesis is wrong. Reading, writing, listening, and speaking are all separate skills. There's certainly some synergy, but ultimately, you get good at what you practice. It is completely possible to understand things at an advanced level and still not be able to speak the language. Recognition and recall are different things. And speaking is even harder than that because you have to be able to recall the language appropriate to the situation and what you want to say in real time while you're also thinking about what you want to say and what the other person is saying. And that's before you even get into the issues of training your muscles to even produce the sounds in the first place.
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 28, 2021 8:27 pm

I doubt that anyone understands everything in any language - even in your native language there will always be specialized terminology as well as regional slang restricted to another age group and area than the one you belong to. If anybody read our tax laws aloud I would definitely not understand everything, and I find them confusing even on print. But right now I listen to German television, and I haven't catched a new word for at least an hour. That's the level I aim for in listening. But I can't claim that I don't speak German so it's not relevant here.

OK, languages I actually don't claim to speak ... Yesterday I listened to one of the programs where hardy men drag lorries back to the Norwegian roads in raging snowstorms. Mostly they speak their own version of English, but while they do the dragging they sometimes yell orders to each others - and then it struck me that I actually didn't understand everything, which is very seldom in Norwegian. I can generally understand everything they send at NRK1, but Norwegian is not one of languages I speak - mainly because I don't own a Something-into-New Norwegian dictionary, and I don't like to write in Bokmål. And if I can't write in a language then I don't even try to speak it. OK, if I spent a week up there I could definitely come up with something that sounded vaguely Norwegian (to people who don't it themselves), but since I don't study the language it would be a travesty - not real spoken Norwegian in any of its multifarious variants.

Another example: Low German (Platt). I learned to understand spoken Low German by listening to NDR many years ago, and when I then found books in it I could also read them. Nullo problemo. But I have never had the opportunity to speak it, and even though I sometimes have written in it I feel on thin ice because I only have a small dictionary with the Sass orthography. So if a Plattschnacker bums vöör mi stünnt then I would probably not dare initiating a real conversation with that person. I have the same problem with Danish dialects: I can produce a travesty, but not really speak them - and I wouldn't do it because it would seem as I made fun of a hapless native speaker.

On the other hand I had the same reservations concerning Scots, but when I then met a couple of native Scots speakers at a gathering in Bratislava it turned out to be fairly easy to speak Scots - mostly because I have studied the language using written sources, written things in it and heard enough spoken "Scots light" to be able to improvise a conversation.

There is a whole lot of languages which I to some extent can read and also write, but not understand as spoken languages - at least not well enough to have conversations in them. My strategy with these languages is to learn to read written sources and to write texts in them with the help of a dictionary - and then add listening and speaking at a later moment, presumably after a trip to a suitable location. But I don't understand everything in any of them, so they are outside the scope of this thread...
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby zgriptsuroica » Tue Nov 30, 2021 8:45 am

SpanishInput wrote:
What about children of immigrants? How come they have a highly proficient understanding of their parent’s language but can’t speak it? In that situation it’s common that the children will be able to perfectly understand the language of their parents, but will have a varying ability to express themselves.”

The statement that these children can “perfectly understand the language of their parents” is easily disproved with the same transcription exercise I suggested above. I once talked to a child of Hispanic immigrants in the US who could not even handle a basic dictation exercise in simple, clearly spoken Spanish. Trying to transcribe a few minutes of any show from Spain or Latin America would have been impossible for her. So, despite her parents being Hispanic, she is far, far from “perfectly understanding the language of her parents”.


Aside from the points already raised by golyplot, I would contest this on the grounds that your test for their comprehension is completely inappropriate. I work with monolingual Spanish speakers who would fail it with even the simplest, most clearly enunciated dialogues. Why? Because they're illiterate. While I don't want to paint with an overly broad brush, many of the children of Spanish-speaking immigrants in NY do not read in Spanish at all, even if they are functionally bilingual when it comes to speech. Many don't receive any formal instruction in Spanish outside of basic courses in it offered in public schools, which are aimed at teaching the language to complete beginners rather than heritage speakers. Unless their families decide to emphasis it, either by making Spanish literature an important part of their home life or making the decision to send them to a dual language school, they can very well make it to adulthood with almost no contact with written Spanish. Consider that New York City, where depending on which estimates you believe, as much as 25% of the 8 million residents speaks Spanish, there is a single Spanish-language book store left, not counting the "librerías cristianas" that only really sell religious books, rather than more diverse offerings. Moreover, it stands to reason that heritage speakers who report an ability to understand but not speak it would be even less likely to be literate.

A more appropriate test of gauging their understanding would be to ask them to tell you what occurred. If they can give you an accurate account of the dialogue in English without glossing over details, I think it's fair to say that they understood it quite fine, even if they couldn't transcribe it.
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby Cainntear » Tue Nov 30, 2021 11:14 pm

SpanishInput wrote:Have you ever heard anyone say...

I understand everything, but I can’t speak”.

My humble opinion is that this common statement just can’t be true.

As others have said, you've set up a strawman.

Yes, the "everything" bit is almost always, if not absolutely always an exaggeration, but your definition of "understanding" doesn't really match what other people mean by it.

Try to produce a fully accurate transcript of what’s being said.

How exact do you have to be able to reproduce something in order to understand it?

I don't know what the Spanish equivalent of "me want biscuit/cookie" is, but it is widely held true in language acquisition circles that a child who says "me want biscuit" fully understands the meaning of the sentence "I want a biscuit." when spoken by an adult or older child who has fully acquired the sentence.
It is beyond doubt that an infant cannot in normal circumstances repeat a sentence if they have not acquired the component parts. In fact, toddlers are often confused by attempted correction, and it seems to be the case that they cannot identify the difference between the parent's attempted correction and their original utterance (but we will never know this for sure, as we can't have an in-depth conversation with a kid about something like that.)

There's a phenomenon called the filter of perception -- we see what we expect to see, and we twist the input to our brain to match what makes sense to us.

One of the most remarkable things I've experienced as a teacher was the day I was doing a listening lesson with a Spanish couple. After the main listening task there was a close-listening gap fill. There were about a dozen gaps in the sentence to fill, and we filled them in as they got them right. Eventually, we had two gaps left. I played the audio file more times than I have ever played a single audio file in class, because I was absolutely stunned by what was happening.

Every single time, they said "prices of houses" -- right from the start they said it, before any of the gaps were filled, and every single time they repeated it. When there were only two gaps left, they were exasperated, because there was only space for two words, and they kept hearing "prices of houses", again and again.

They understood the message, because the words that hit their ear were "house prices" -- they absolutely understood the intended meaning, they just couldn't repeat the sentence because their process of understanding had involved their brains manipulating the input to match their internal model.

We all do this -- when we hear different accents and dialectal variation (e.g. "if I'd've known, I'd've gone" instead of standard "If I'd known, I'd've gone") we understand them by ignoring the differences and matching to the best fit, and there will be times that you will think you've repeated verbatim what someone else said, but you actually haven't, because you've "corrected" it to what you think the language should be.

Now, why is it the case that you believed you could “understand everything”, when that’s not the case? Maybe you have gotten used to only listening/reading for meaning, and just guessing the parts you don’t understand. This might have also caused common expressions and pesky little words such as prepositions, reflexive pronouns and direct/indirect object pronouns to fall between the cracks.

If an English speaker says "that depends on you" and a Spanish speaker hears "that depends of you", that's not "guessing" -- that's understanding -- the failure to notice happens because there is no need to notice. Language is redundant, and full comprehension of the message does not require noticing everything -- this is the reason learning by exposure doesn't lead to accurate productive skills.

IMHO, both your lack of ability to produce language and the fact that you don’t really understand everything have the same root: Your level of knowledge of the language is just not quite there yet, and you just need to keep learning.

Don't blame the learner. Failure to learn is more often down to failure to provide a good learning environment.
If you really could understand everything, then you should also be able to speak.

OK, but consider that your English is very good, but no learner is ever 100% native-like. If I say something that you yourself could not independently have produced yourself, that doesn't mean you didn't understand me, does it? And that feeds back into my point about dialects, because I'm sure there will be dialectal forms in Spanish that you would struggle to repeat without a lot of conscious effort, but you know exactly what they mean.

I once talked to a child of Hispanic immigrants in the US who could not even handle a basic dictation exercise in simple, clearly spoken Spanish.

Because dictation is not a linguistic task, it's meta-linguistic. It involves awareness of structure in order to hold the utterance in your head verbatim until you have completed it.
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby Dragon27 » Wed Dec 01, 2021 5:21 am

Cainntear wrote:your definition of "understanding" doesn't really match what other people mean by it.

It does seem to be the case, but if we get that out of the way, what would you say about the rest of the claim? What if learner's perception of the language has developed to the degree that OP implies by "full understanding" - with the ability to properly decipher the actual spoken words (including all the pesky grammatical, auxilliary words, prepositions, etc.) from a typical native TV show? Will that learner be then able to produce the language themselves?
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby zgriptsuroica » Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:52 am

Working with several such people, I would say no. If they decide to try and develop their production abilities, I would be inclined to think they might advance faster than other learners, but a high level of comprehension does not, of itself, produce a sudden epiphany whereby the individual finds themselves suddenly capable of speech.
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Re: “I understand everything, but I can’t speak”

Postby Cainntear » Wed Dec 01, 2021 10:43 am

Dragon27 wrote:
Cainntear wrote:your definition of "understanding" doesn't really match what other people mean by it.

It does seem to be the case, but if we get that out of the way, what would you say about the rest of the claim? What if learner's perception of the language has developed to the degree that OP implies by "full understanding" - with the ability to properly decipher the actual spoken words (including all the pesky grammatical, auxilliary words, prepositions, etc.) from a typical native TV show? Will that learner be then able to produce the language themselves?

Taking the definition of a "learner" as someone who has actively chosen to learn a language, I don't think it's possible for an average person to reach that point without output and conscious work (study and/or correction). Without that, some grammatical (and phonological) information is likely to be ignored, and the full language model will not be acquired.

Children's first language can be different -- I've heard of cases where children have been silent for years and then start talking in fully-formed sentences from their first words. It may be that a similar phenomenon occurs with bilingual kids, but it's certainly not something I've heard of happening -- I've only heard of kids moving from receptive-only to productive in weeks or months when they're moved to a place where their receptive-only language is spoken and have to use it to play with other kids. So I'm not going to rule out the possibility, but equally not going to assume it to be the case.
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