“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- Start watching a TV show or movie that was originally made in your target language.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?