this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Wow this could have actually happened:
Source
Funny, it really is easier to get the gist of what someone is saying in a foreign language that one has some familiarity with, but constructing a sentence with the correct words and grammar is a completely different game.
I'm curious how it is for other languages, but I find that in English I can usually understand someone trying to explain something using incorrect words and bad grammar if we go at it long enough
Tonal languages are probably harder to make sense.
When you say "Ma" in Mandarin you could mean 4 different things.
So if I was trying to say "I like my horse" or "I like my mother" you'd say "I like my ma". Unless you had context you wouldn't know what I was trying to say if I didn't use the correct tone.
English tones give extra information.
"I LIKE my horse" or "I like MY horse".
One you could like your horse, other you might really LIKE your horse.
"I go store" vs "I am going to go to the store now". The meaning isn't really lost.
English is hard because speaking it well is complex. There are dozens of way to say "walked"
Did the man stroll down the street? Strut, marched, trudged, shuffled, stumbled, hobbled, or etc.
Someone that doesn't know English well would understand that the man hobbling down the street means that the man went down the street. But hobbling has the idea that the man is injured. If they were trying to describe the man limping down the road they would be thrown off thinking about how they could describe it as hobbled. "The man walked with a limp down the street" or "The man limped as he walked down the street"
Then there's things like "The man hobbled down Bourbon Street" now you get the idea that he is hobbling because of being intoxicated rather than injured.
But getting the general idea is pretty simple. "Man go road"
I think English is very context driven where I find other languages much more specific and precise. The word “cool” for instance can probably have a dozen different meanings depending on context so perversely IMO simple English can be sorted out by feel more easily where other languages are less tolerant of that.
Yep. Reading a book or watching a movie in Spanish is as easy as English to me. Speaking? I can definitely hold a conversation but it won't be fluid or elegant at all.
To be fair I spend a ton more time listening to Spanish than speaking it. Consuming content is easy, social interactions hard lmao
It blows my mind because my wife can hear and read other languages and translate it with insane accuracy, but she wouldn't be able to hold a conversation.
My English speaking brain can't do it.
I'm the opposite with Japanese, at least. I can construct sentences and know what to say, but when native speakers talk to me, I just can't follow well at all.
How did you learn it? I'm actually curious because that would probably explain why.
I took some class in college, otherwise via apps like WaniKani, Duolingo and Busuu.
My guess would be textbook language vs reality slang.
So OP might be able to listed to a newspaper but would loose context in a slang-heavy tv show
Maybe also a case of dialect vs standard language
So very much this, I've been living in a foreign country for 6 months now and taking language classes. I can eavesdrop better than just about any other skill. Including understanding when spoken to directly.
Doesn't help basically everyone speaks English.
I get this with my native language which country I still live in, Sweden, because I'm stuck at home the vast majority of the time due to illness and basically only read and watch things in English. So when I do get out I often forget Swedish words and have generally speak badly, it's kinda funny.
You would have been SUCH a successful spy 40 years ago when top secret stuff was still mainly via face to face conversations 😁
Them: Papiere bitte
Me: What? Uhhh I mean, was?
Them: 🤨
Sometimes it can be the opposite as well, because missing a key word or two renders all the other stuff you understood in the sentence basically useless. If you understood "He has a new X and he's gonna try Y tomorrow," you got everything except the gist, but constructing basic sentences doesn't take all that much study.
Anyway, I'd recommend not trying to do Japanese through immersion.
Japanese has a cheat code though. If you try to say English words with a Japanese accent they can mostly understand you. Words like hamburger and strawberry are a good example.
But strawberry are ichigo and not "stuawbelly", no?
The huge number of loanwords is a bit of a boon, but the benefits are canceled out by the small amount of sounds in the language. There are so many homophones and words with similar sounds that learning vocab is really difficult.
Also it was years before I found out that hambaagaa is a hamburger and hambaagu is a meat patty on a plate.
understanding and producing and two entirely different skills, and for many people one of them makes them anxious
Yeah, I remember going through that period when started learning English, but also attending other classes that I was passionate about and didn't want to wait.
I understood everything the teacher said, but tough luck if I had any question. I remember trying to ask once and teacher trying to figure out what I was asking.
I think anybody who's bilingual or attempting to learn another language or done some duolingo classes can relate to a degree.
Reading/writing, speaking, and listening can feel like different skills.
There's also, at least for Spanish but probably for other languages too, a significant difference between the academic version and the colloquial version.
I assume it's sort of like if you, as an English speaker, only spoke as if you were composing a college essay.