How can someone understand a language but not be able to speak it?
In: Other
Making the sounds with your mouth takes practice, moreso if the phonemes (basic sound blocks) of the language are alien to your mother tongue. And if you’re learning a tonal language like Chinese, you basically need to re-learn your inflection habits from scratch because otherwise you’ll be unintelligible just from using the wrong tone.
Added to the fact that you don’t need to worry about incorrect grammar when listening (assuming the speaker knows the language), and it should be clear why it’s a lot easier to hear a language and understand, than it is to get that language to come out of your mouth.
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