How is the input of a different language understood, but the output of that language difficult?
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I can understand and write german, but I dont ever speak it because my accent and stuff is just embarrassing to anybody who has a clue of how it’s supposed to sound.
It’s the difference between being able to read a paragraph and writing one. You can read language that you’re familiar with and get the author’s meaning (even if they use a word you’ve not seen before, you can get the gist). Writing a paragraph properly is “hard” by comparison.
And that’s for a language you’re native in. Now take a language where you have a simple subset of the vocabulary and a basic understanding. You can pick out meaning from the words you know, look up any you don’t. But actually writing something in that language would be very difficult and involve a lot of looking up words you don’t know how to translate. Speaking would be a magnitude more difficult, because you can’t stop and take that time to research how to say each word or phrase you don’t know.
I’ll expand on speaking being active and listening being passive. Think about what’s physically happening. When you listen, sound waves hit your ear and your ear does ear things and sends sound information to your brain where it is processed and understood.
Now for speaking, you start with the understanding and generate the words. Now your muscles get involved, and there’s about 100 involved in speaking. You need to train all those muscles to work properly to make the sounds.
It’s the difference between watching Olympic gymnastics and understanding the routines and actually doing it.
I started to understand Czech because listening and reading are passive skills (where you don’t have to produce language) and it is not necessary to perfectly understand every single word, conjugation or declination. I could get the idea of each conversation, even if it was too fast for me to hear each word. I started understanding a lot of Czech after 6 months, but was very hesitant to speak for years.
Speaking is an active skill (where you must produce language) and you are choosing from limited vocabulary and grammatical patterns. Your brain sometimes can’t work fast enough to piece together a sentence in conversation. In addition, if you are shy or anxious to speak, it can become more difficult to concentrate and speak correctly.
Listening is passive, while speaking is active.
Listening requires you to just take in information, which doesn’t require you to think too much.
Speaking requires you to process what the other person has said, then think of what and how to respond. That requires more work than you think, and certainly more work than listening.
Because you listen for words in your native language you recognize or are similar to help fill in the major gaps for what you don’t understand while listening for the stuff you do comprehend.
Happens to me for Tagalog, the Filipino dialect my mother speaks. Also happens to me for French because I took six years of it across middle school and high school, and sometimes Japanese from just watching subbed anime since the 90s; and I never personally had to ever really use those languages myself in order to communicate, so my sentence syntax would be horrible if I even tried.
I’d like to add to the other comments. Speaking requires more resources- you have to say the words in the right way while also keeping in mind what you want to say, the grammatical structure of the sentence and so on. It’s very easy in your native language, because you’ve had a lot of time to basically train this until it becomes something automatic (you do it with ease and without trying hard). For a language you don’t know that well, this becomes much harder. You now have to pay *more* attention to your pronounciation and your grammar structure, all while keeping track of your idea.
Listening to someone else just doesn’t require this many resources. You’re able to focus on the idea and the words, without paying attention to the rest. You also have non-verbal ques that might help you (someone looking sad and saying something about work probably didn’t talk about being promoted for example).
Tell me all the synonyms of “get”. You probably can’t name half of them. But you will recognise pretty much all of them (depending on how well-read you are). Productions is always harder than recognition.
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