I’ve found that a lot of my friends can understand a language, but lack the ability to read, speak, or write it, resulting in a lot of strange conversations where their parents speak a different language to them and they reply in English. How does this even happen?
In: Biology
Listening is passive, speaking is active.
When you listen to someone, all your brain needs to do is sit there and listen and understand the words being said.
But to speak, you need to start from scratch and formulate your own words and your own sentence. And then you need to send those signals to your mouth and throat to make the right sounds, and you might not be used to making those sounds.
When you are hearing a language, you only have to understand one word at a time. Often from context clues, you don’t even need to understand every word.
To speak, you have to consider all the words that might go next, at the speed of spoken language. Then you choose one (or a phrase) and while your saying that you have to choose what goes next. That’s orders of magnitude harder, and causes stutters and “uhhh” filler sounds.
If someone is describing a play uses the word “soliloquy” I will remember my high school English class well enough to understand the sentence.
If someone asks me “hey, what’s that word for when someone in a play says their internal thoughts out loud?” I would have no idea and never remember that one word from high school English class.
So it’s like that.
ALSO: It is easy to understand someone using proper grammar and conjugation (as in knowing to say I am and not I are). It is much harder to actually intuitively know how to use all those rules.
ALSO: For many people, they get mocked relentlessly for not speaking ’right’ which unfortunately discourages them from trying and building fluency. They get lots of practice listening though.
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