Why you're not getting better at your target language (and its not your fault)

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]You've been studying Spanish for three years. You know what the subjunctive is.

[00:00:03]You can explain when to use s versus estar. You've watched grammar videos.

[00:00:08]You've filled out conjugation tables.

[00:00:11]You've got a notion doc with color-coded rules. And then a Spanish speaker asks you what you did this weekend and your brain just buffers like a YouTube video on hotel Wi-Fi. Does this mean that you're bad at languages? Not so fast.

[00:00:26]I'm convinced nobody's inherently bad at languages. The problem is that nobody told you there are actually two completely different things people call knowing a language and you've been training the wrong one. It's actually why most linguists I know hate when you ask how many languages they speak.

[00:00:42]They've made the same mistake and they know a lot about a lot of languages, but most couldn't so much as order a coffee in their languages of interest. or if we're talking about historical linguistics, bewail the sacking and raising of a city, the pillaging of belongings, and the abduction of the people. You know, basic stuff in your target language. So, today I'm breaking down what it takes to know a language in the sense we all mean when we say we want to know a language. And what we've been doing is not getting us there. And no, I'm not going to say that you shouldn't study grammar or any nonsense like that. It's just that the way we go about things is often training the wrong kind of knowing. If you're new here, welcome. I'm Dr. Taylor Jones. I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania. And on the channel, I discuss everything related to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture. If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications. So, let's get into why you know all about your target language, but you still can't use it in daily life. I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, and this is Language Jones.

[00:01:46]Quick pause before we get into it. And this one actually fits the topic, I promise. Today's video is sponsored by Lingod, who reached out kind of at the perfect time, because everything I'm about to talk about in this video is the reason their whole setup makes sense to me. Lingod is an online language school, live classes, real certified teachers, max five students per group, so you actually get to speak and get feedback instead of just watching a video and nodding. They do English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian. And the thing I want to flag is their flex plan.

[00:02:15]You book classes 24/7 whenever your schedule allows, but the curriculum behind it is actually structured. So, you're not just dropping into random lessons. You're moving through a real progression, which as we're about to discuss is one of the things that your brain actually needs. And here's the part that you'll want to hear. Lingod is running their May sale right now, and you can get up to 40% off flex plans with my code, Jones May. That's the biggest discount they do all year and it ends May 26th and new students can start with a 7-day free trial to test it out first. Link and code are in the description. If you've been telling yourself this is the year, this is genuinely a good moment to stop telling yourself and to start doing the reps.

[00:02:54]Okay, back to the video. Okay, so let's get nerdy for a second, but in a fun way, I promise. Psychologists divide knowledge into two big categories: declarative and procedural. It's already clicking for some of you right now what I'm going to say. Declarative knowledge is the stuff that you can state facts, rules, information that you can pull up and describe. The capital of Francis Paris in German, the verb goes second in main clauses. That's declarative.

[00:03:17]Procedural knowledge is the stuff that you can do. It's in your hands, your mouth, your reflexes, riding a bike, touch typing, catching a ball. You can't really explain how you do it. You just do it. And if you tried to consciously think about every step, you'd fall off the bike. So, quick test. Can you explain in detail how you balance on a bicycle? Like the actual physics of micro adjusting your weight and leaning into a turn and all of that? Probably not, but you can ride one. Apologies to viewers who can't ride one. But the point is that's procedural knowledge.

[00:03:47]Now, here's the key takeaway. Speaking a language is in many regards procedural, almost entirely procedural. How often are you thinking specifically about verb conjugations or adjective agreement when you speak your native language? It's even axiomatic in linguistics that you can't just ask native speakers what they're doing when they're speaking their native language because they genuinely don't know. Some of you have had this experience with phenology, the sounds of a language, when you ask a native speaker about pronunciation. My father-in-law experienced this when he asked a Roman waiter about a spoon and kept getting the romanesco accent. He'd ask about standard and be told yes, and then the waiter would repeat what to us sounded like a different word. I once asked if I was pronouncing to yam correctly. I didn't always keep kosher.

[00:04:32]What can I say? And I got a waiter who very enthusiastically told me I was absolutely saying it correctly while repeating it with a completely different tonal contour, which was different than the one he used when saying it to the kitchen. The point is that it is so automatic that we're not good at describing it when it's our language.

[00:04:48]Think about what your brain has to do in real time to have a normal conversation.

[00:04:52]You hear sounds, you parse them into words, you figure out what those words mean in this context. By the way, these are not sequential. They're cascading mental activations. So, you're actually forming hypotheses unconsciously about what the words you're hearing might be based on meanings you might expect, and you update this predictive engine in real time. Then, or partially concurrently, you form an intention to reply. You pull up the right vocabulary out of tens of thousands of options. You arrange those words in the right order.

[00:05:21]You conjugate the verbs. You match the genders. You produce the right sounds with your mouth. You read your conversation partner's face to see if they even got it. And you do all of that in like 200 milliseconds while also thinking about what you're saying. And similar to comprehension, the science on production suggests cascading mental activations, combining concepts, funological representations of those objects, that is the sounds that make up words for the concepts you're thinking, activation of and priming of similar words, and psychological activation of highfrequency co-occurrences, and so on.

[00:05:56]You cannot do that effectively by consulting the rules. There's literally not enough time. The information has to be baked in, automatic, reflexive, procedural. By the way, if you want to know more about how that works and how language in general works, I'm developing a self-paced digital introduction to linguistics called the language blueprint. You can sign up for updates and the weight list at www.languagejones.com/bloopprint.

[00:06:20]And if you just want to know how to learn a language, check out my other course, the language learning accelerator. Same site/acelerator.

[00:06:28]So, what do fluent speakers actually have? Two main things. One, a huge vocabulary where each word comes prepackaged with how it's used, what it pairs with, what registers it lives in, what feels natural next to it. And two, rapid automatic procedures for combining all that stuff into sentences without thinking about it. That's it. That's everything. So, here's where most learners go wrong. And honestly, here's where the whole industry kind of leads you wrong. textbooks, including the ones I use and like, grammar review books, YouTube explainer videos, those neat little charts of verb endings, all that is teaching you declarative knowledge about the language, facts, rules, information that you can describe, and it feels productive. You finish a study session and you can clearly say, "Today, I learned the difference between the predate and the imperfect." Tangible progress. A little gold star. But here's the cruel twist. That kind of knowledge does almost nothing for your ability to speak. You've learned a fact about Spanish. You haven't built the reflex.

[00:07:25]It's like reading a book about swimming.

[00:07:27]You can read every book in the library.

[00:07:28]You can write a dissertation on freestyle stroke mechanics. I assume somebody somewhere is conferring doctorates on swimming mechanics. The moment you get into the pool, you'll sink because swimming is procedural and you have only declarative knowledge, book learning. And the really painful part, declarative knowledge can feel like a substitute for the real thing.

[00:07:48]You can have entire conversations about Japanese grammar in English and walk away feeling like a Japanese learner.

[00:07:56]You're not. You're a Japanese grammar enthusiast, which is fine. Just don't confuse it with learning to speak. Okay.

[00:08:03]So, how do you actually build the procedural stuff? Repetition. Honestly, that's most of the answer. Reps with real language in context over and over until the patterns stop being rules. you apply and start being shapes that your mouth knows. This is why kids who grow up bilingual usually can't explain their own grammar. They never really learned it as rules. They absorbed the patterns through thousands of hours of input and use. You don't have thousands of hours like a kid does probably, but the principle is the same. The things that build procedural fluency are one, massive amounts of input that you can mostly understand. Uh reading and listening to stuff that's a little bit challenging but not totally over your head. This is where your brain can start to extract patterns without you noticing. Now, I'll say that a lot of people leave it there, and I actually don't like that alone as an answer. What I do, and what works for me, though your mileage may vary, is to skim a descriptive grammar and then work through a resource like a textbook or build something with an LLM to get repetitions of a grammar pattern that I conceptually understand. So for instance, I have the declarative knowledge that in Hebrew there are two kinds of PAL verbs that have a slightly different vowel in the future tense.

[00:09:12]Ones that have a phological reason, a guttural or historically guttural consonant in the last two roots and ones that are stative. But I also simply practice tons of repetitions in Anki with words that have those features. Not all of them to be sure, but enough of the funological ones that I know what feels right and enough of the highest frequency state of ones that I'm unlikely to make a mistake there. And I can always fall back on my declarative knowledge if I'm really stumped. But I already know without thinking about it, without deriving it from declarative knowledge that the future forms are and so on. Second is output practice.

[00:09:50]Actually speaking and writing badly a lot. Yes, badly. The badness is the point. You are stress testing and finding your limitations. This can be journaling, which I hate, but I do. Or it can be conversation with a tutor. I started journaling and I absolutely loathe it. But like deadlifting, I do it because it actually works. Third is space repetition with vocabulary, but with whole phrases and example sentences, not isolated word list.

[00:10:13]Because remember, words come with all this baggage about how they're actually used. I found personally that whole sentences are frankly a lot. I have to remind myself that they're actually forcing me to recall like three to five things, not just one. So, wherever possible, what I do now is break them into component chunks at least for the new parts. Maybe not one word, but I'll definitely memorize something like speed limit or even going over the speed limit instead of separately memorizing speed and limit. Lately, I've been using LLM to assist in extracting, chunking, and dumping entire textbooks into ANI. every vocabulary word, every sentence of every dialogue, every example sentence, and every exercise. From there, I move on to working with an LLM to come up with vocabulary chunks and phrases, and example sentences in domains that I'm interested in, like specialty coffee.

[00:11:02]Another great thing to do is extract and memorize information from podcasts, TV, and movies, YouTube videos, or books.

[00:11:08]You get the benefit of engaging with real material and the fun of what YouTube polygots call immersion. It's not even remotely immersion, but that's a different video for a different day.

[00:11:18]And the benefits of space repetition practice. So, what doesn't build procedural fluency or builds it really inefficiently? Memorizing conjugation tables. Like literally the spatial memory of a table. I find that it can help as a fail safe. But when you've actually learned chunks of the language in context, it's kind of a backup description of what you already know at this point. Reading grammar explanations over and over again. Watching 12 videos about the subjunctive. There's only one video that you'll ever need about the subjunctive, and I made it. I'll link it at the end. So, those things give you stuff to say about the language, but they don't make you faster at producing it. Now, I'm not saying that grammar is useless. I want to be clear about that.

[00:11:55]You don't get a PhD in linguistics if you think something that inane. Some declarative knowledge is genuinely helpful, especially early on as a kind of scaffolding. Knowing that German has cases or that Mandarin uses tones, help you notice things in the input that you'd otherwise miss. It's a map. Maps are useful. mind maps particularly so but a map is not the territory. You can study a map of Tokyo for 10 years and you still haven't been to Tokyo. At some point you have to land at Narita and start walking around and sweating. It is way more human than reading a map would lead you to believe. Using grammar books isn't a mistake. Studying grammar is actually a good use of some of your time. The mistake is spending all your time in grammar books and thinking that that's the same as using the language.

[00:12:35]Yes, you're studying the language, but you're studying about it, not learning how to use it. It's like memorizing the tuning of a guitar. Yes, it's better to actually know that without having to look it up every time, but it's not the same as doing the scale practice or ear training to be able to actually engage with real music using that guitar. In this analogy, most linguists are like historians of the art of being a luier or something. They can tell you about the history of the development of the nut and bridge on various guitars, but they can't tune, let alone play a real guitar. Don't be a linguist. So, if you've been studying for a while and you feel stuck, like you know a ton about your target language, but you still freeze when someone actually speaks it, you're probably not lazy and you're not bad at languages. You've just been training the wrong system and wasting your time on ineffective study methods.

[00:13:21]The fix is kind of unlamorous. Less explaining, more doing, less rules, more reps, listen to more stuff, read more stuff, talk to people, and be okay with being bad at it for a while. Your brain knows how to do this. Trust the process.

[00:13:32]the real one, not the one with the highlighter. Of course, the process needs to be an effective process based on what we know about learning. For more on that, don't forget to sign up for updates and the wait list for my language learning accelerator. And of course, I'll link videos in the description that talk about how to optimize your learning. Drop a comment with the language that you're learning and where you feel stuck. I'm curious to hear it. And if this was useful, you know the thing, like, subscribe, all that. Especially the nearly 60% of you who watched but aren't subscribed. See you next time.