Five years coaching French and I see the same thing almost every time: good knowledge, zero spontaneous speech. Here's what I have discovered.
One of my students recently asked me how she can be comfortable with the structure of French, the vocabulary and the conjugation but yet when she tries to speak it feels like she has never studied French in her life. It made me realise that in my time working with students, most of whom are not beginners, they have studied for years. Some of them know grammar that most native French speakers often get wrong. And almost every single one of them freezes the moment they have to actually speak. Like the language they spent years learning just disappeared.
It took me a while to understand why, because it seemingly doesn’t make any sense. They know the words and the structures. But knowing and using are completely different things, and almost nothing in standard language education builds the second one.
The best way I have found to think about it is like a muscle in the gym: you wouldn’t be able to go from not lifting any weight one day to then bench pressing 100kg the next. You have to train it consistently, day after day, week after week until you can go from 15kg to 20 to 50 and then one day you can lift 100kg.
Back on to languages now, here is what actually happens in your brain when you try to speak a language you've learned passively:
You hear something. You try to decode it word by word. By the time you've decoded it, the moment has passed. You try to respond whilst searching for the right word. Once you find it. You try to remember the conjugation. You second-guess it. You say nothing, or you say sorry, or you switch to English.
That entire process happens in about two seconds and it feels like failure but it isn’t. It's just the wrong kind of practice catching up with you.
The only thing that closes that gap is daily contact with the language in a context where you're actually producing it, not choosing from a list, not filling in a blank, but constructing something and having a real person respond to it. Your brain needs to build a reflex, and reflexes don't come from weekly practice. They come from daily repetition over weeks until a new language stops feeling like a translation exercise and starts feeling like a thought.
I’m interested to hear if people have similar experiences and how they have overcome them. Is anyone else experiencing this right now? Happy to share some learnings from my experience if that would be helpful.