Why You Understand but Can't Speak Mandarin Chinese
How to turn your understanding to speaking fluent Chinese.
Has this ever happened to you?
You're having a conversation in your target language. You understand what is being said and know what you want to say, but when you speak, you sound clunky and unnatural.
Or you're with a group of native speakers, and you understand the main idea of what they’re talking about, but you stay quiet and hope they don't ask you anything because you think you’ll freeze and stumble over your words.
Sound familiar?
Why does this happen?
It often stems from some common myths about listening and speaking:
You think you can improve your speaking the same way you improve your listening.
You think learning a lot of vocabulary will help you speak better.
You think that focusing on listening alone will translate to speaking fluently.
But we know this is not true.
A common example is children of immigrants who grow up hearing their parents' native language at home. Since they rarely practice speaking, it’s no surprise they can understand far better than they can speak.
Listening and speaking are related but different skills. Listening helps with speaking, but listening alone won’t make you fluent.
Why Speaking Is So Hard.
Most learners spend way more time listening than speaking, especially in the beginning. Listening can be totally passive—you can do it for hours a day without much effort (and that’s a good thing!) while speaking needs your full focus (active).
Even if you don’t understand everything while listening, you are still learning. You still pick up the sounds, rhythm, pronunciation, and how sentences are put together. It’s like warming up to the language, and it keeps you motivated to learn more.
Speaking, on the other hand, takes more mental effort. You’ve got to think about the words, grammar, and pronunciation, and put it all together on the spot. Plus, your mouth has to get used to making sounds it’s not familiar with (muscle memory). Just because your brain knows a word doesn’t mean your mouth is ready to say it smoothly.
Listening also gives you clues. Even if you don’t catch every word, context from the sentence and conversation helps you figure out the general meaning.
Speaking is tougher because you don’t have those clues. Instead of recognizing words, you have to dig them up from memory without any hints (active recall).
And let’s not forget the social pressure from speaking. Speaking comes with the fear of making mistakes or sounding silly, which can hold you back. But this isn’t just about learning a new language—it’s something many people struggle with, even in their native language. So don’t be too hard on yourself.
But if your listening is better than your speaking this is not a bad thing.
In fact, if your listening is better than your speaking, this is actually a good place to be because it means that you're on the right path.
The typical progression looks like this:
Can’t Understand, Can’t Speak
Can Understand, Can’t Speak
Can Understand, Can Speak
Ok, I get it but how do we start to improve our speaking then?
How to Improve Your Speaking?
Einstein famously stated, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level that it was created.”
But many learners make the mistake of thinking that you can improve your speaking the same way you improve your listening.
You quickly realize that this doesn’t work because speaking is more complicated, with many moving pieces.
With listening, it’s easy to improve by listening broadly even without a clear and directed approach because you still learn common vocabulary, the sounds of the language, and a general sense of the language.
It’s easy to listen for hours passively throughout the day but with speaking, you have to be actively engaged and coordinate multiple things at once. It’s much more mentally taxing.
Thus, there is more friction and fewer opportunities to practice speaking, which means our exposure to speaking practice is far lower, and our ability to build momentum and confidence is much lower.
As a result, it’s harder to see results.
So, we need to be much more careful and selective with how we practice speaking because we don’t have a lot of opportunities.
So what should we do?
The Principle of Specificity
When I studied kinesiology in university, we learned about the Principle of Specificity. It means your training works best when it matches your goal. The type of exercise, how often you do it, and how long you train should all line up with what you want to achieve.
The closer your training is to your goal, the better your results will be.
For example:
A sprinter should train for sprinting, not marathon running.
A bodybuilder should focus on strength training, not cardiovascular exercise.
Training should progress from general conditioning to specific training for the skills required in a sport or activity.
Similarly, with language learning, our studies should progress from general listening to specific listening and speaking practice required for our goals.
This means your learning should be personalized to your unique interests.
If your studies are general and unorganized, your results will be general and unorganized.
This means to stop trying to learn about too many topics at once. You need to focus your learning. Otherwise, you’re wasting your energy and time and spreading yourself too thin.
While with listening practice we can listen broadly and still see results, with speaking, we need to learn deeply first, then go wide.
You do this by focusing your efforts on a particular topic instead of learning about a broad range of topics.
Instead of trying to speak about a broad range of topics, it’s better to build local expertise in one particular topic. You learn the ins and outs of having a conversation around that topic, gain local confidence, and then transfer it to another topic.
This makes it easier for you to build confidence, momentum, and motivation.
Is it limiting? Of course. That’s the point. You want to limit your learning in the beginning. It’s the same idea as having training wheels when you learn to ride a bike. It limits what you can and can’t do, but you learn the basics. Then, you can take them off and go faster and do tricks once you’ve mastered the basics of not falling down.
But how do we do this?
Problem-Based Learning.
Many learners try to improve their speaking by learning more vocabulary or more grammar lessons without practicing speaking. But this is like putting a bandage on the problem—it makes you feel better, but you’re not fixing the root problem.
Accumulating vocabulary is like accumulating more tools in the toolbox but if you don’t know what your problem is, they remain unused in your toolbox and without use, they malfunction.
This is wasted effort and time.
Tools are useful when there is a problem. Vocabulary is useful when you have a message you want to communicate or something you want to say.
But how do I know what to talk about?
Instead of looking for vocabulary, look for interesting problems to solve, and the right vocabulary will reveal itself naturally.
During my training to become a medical doctor, we learned about the power of PBL, or problem-based learning.
Problem-based learning has been shown by many studies to be more effective than lecture-based learning in improving knowledge, social and communication skills, problem-solving, self-learning, and student satisfaction.
We learn best when we have a tangible problem to direct our learning and apply what we’ve learned.
This means picking a particular problem, topic, or question that you want to talk about and focusing your learning on that.
Here are some questions that help me:
Which topics am I passionate about and interested in?
Are there questions that people ask me all the time?
Are there topics that I often struggle to talk about?
Is there a topic that I have a controversial opinion about?
If you struggle with speaking, then the answers to these questions are often obvious. You already have an interesting problem to work towards.
Now you just need to do it.
Remember, speaking and languages at its core are a tool for communication.
It's not about how many compliments you get (or don’t get) about your pronunciation. Speaking is not a performance. It’s about how well you can communicate your points when you need to. And you can do it effectively without knowing a ton of vocabulary.
The “Now” Method.
The biggest mistake I see learners make is learning for the future. They accumulate and hoard vocabulary for the future.
You learn phrases you won’t use now.
You learn grammar points you won’t use now.
You learn about topics that are not relevant to you now.
If you do this, you need to stop.
This is wasting your time.
If you’re just learning for fun and you don’t care about whether you improve or not, then it doesn’t matter.
But if you’re serious about improving your speaking, you need to focus on “now.”
Whenever I learn something new, I always ask myself:
Can I see myself using this vocabulary in the next week?
Do I want to talk about this topic soon?
This is the opposite of how we’ve been taught to learn in classrooms, learning a whole semester for one big exam. The best learning happens not when we cram for the exam at the end of the year, but when we have many mini “exams,” learning and applying what we learn every day.
Focus on “now” to minimize the time between learning a new phrase or vocabulary and using it.
The faster you apply what you learn, the faster you consolidate and remember it.
Everything else is a distraction.
Pick a Language “Role Model”.
We are the average of the five people we spend the most time with.
So, it stands to reason that the way we speak in our target language is the average of the five people we spend the most time with (listening and speaking).
The reason you understand but can’t speak is that you're listening to too many people. Again, you're spreading yourself thin.
Think of someone you enjoy listening to in your target language. Do you like the way they sound when they speak? Do you like the vocabulary they use? Do you like how insightful and articulate they are?
Pick a few people and focus on them only. Ignore everyone else.
When I started learning Mandarin, I would listen to 1-2 podcasts with the same hosts over and over again without getting distracted by other podcasts.
The results?
I picked up their mannerisms, their accents, and even the words they use all the time.
The fastest way to build momentum and progress with your speaking is to model your speaking after someone you resonate with and admire by spending as much time as you can with them (listening or speaking).
Immerse yourself with their voice.
You will naturally start sounding like them, just as we naturally start to pick up words and even change our accents when we travel or move to a new country.
Humans are sponges. We naturally absorb our surroundings. It makes us feel safe when we assimilate ourselves into a group or community.
Pick someone and stick with them, avoiding distractions, and you'll be surprised by how much progress you can make when you focus your efforts.
How I Structure My Learning.
This is the study routine that helped me learn to speak fluent Mandarin Chinese after 5 years of trial and error. I keep it simple with only 3 essential steps:
Pick a problem
A question that people ask me all the time
A topic that I’m interested in right now
A topic I had difficulty expressing myself in the past
An interesting idiom or vocab I learned recently
Figure out what you want to say
Listen and consume information around this topic from my language “role model”. Repeat often.
Pick vocabulary and phrases around that topic.
Try to imagine myself being asked the question, being in an argument, or trying to prove my point. This helps me put myself in the situation of speaking instead of just performing a homework assignment. This is practice for real life.
Practice and apply what you learn
Talking to myself while walking or doing other things
Recording myself speaking
Practicing with a teacher or through language exchange.
I do these 3 things every single day: pick a problem, figure out what I want to say and then say it.
Throughout the day I'm always doing steps 1 and 2: listening to my role model and collecting ideas and problems that I can talk about in the future so I never run out of ideas.
I only set aside time for step 3 where I practice and apply what I learn by speaking. Usually, I’m speaking to myself or recording myself speaking. 1-2 times a week I schedule class with my teacher to practice speaking in a real conversation.
It sounds simple because it is. You learn everything you need for maximum results and nothing you don’t need now.
This way, you build progress, confidence and momentum fast.
I hope this helps you.
加油，
Danyo
PS Here are some ways I can help you:
Copy Paste Speak Course: A step-by-step system to teach yourself to speak Mandarin like native speakers.
Chinese Speakers Community: I’ll help you level up your Mandarin speaking faster so you can talk about what you want in 30 minutes a day. You get all my courses, trainings, exercises and personalized feedback. Apply here.