The Fluency Habit: English for Real Life
Jun 9, 2026 · 35 min · 12 segments
This is the reason why traditional language-learning methods fail you, leave you ill-prepared to speak the language, and can actually hinder your fluency in a foreign language. I look forward to…
And what do all of these have in common? The common denominator is that in all of these situations, Language is presented to you as something visual.
That is, something on a piece of paper, in a book, or on a board that you see with your eyes and interpret.
You did not learn your native language in this way.
By the time you were introduced to letters and reading and writing, you could already have complete conversations.
You could argue.
You could express your wants and desires and complain about things and talk about the weather.
And basically, you were a fluent speaker of your native language by the time you were taught how to spell your name.
So we need to ask ourselves, why is this suddenly reversed when it comes to learning a second or third or fourth language? When it comes to learning a foreign language, why do we start with writing before we can even speak? So that is essentially the main problem with traditional language learning.
And the reason that this is a problem, the reason this holds you back later on, is that language in essence is oral.
Language is oral.
And so what that means is I make sounds, I speak, and your ears hear me, and you interpret the things that I, the sounds that I make, and you understand me.
And you move your mouth, make sounds, I hear the sounds with my ears, and I interpret them, and I understand you.
So language in essence is oral.
Writing is simply a visual representation of the oral language.
And in the long history of language development and evolution, writing is really, really new.
Like if we think about language developing over thousands and thousands of years, being able to write something and use our eyes to interpret language is a relatively new phenomenon.
The mistake that traditional language learning methods make is treating the written language as the real language and the oral language as this thing that we do and it may or may not match to the written language which is like the real thing.
You'll also see this outside of the foreign language learning community.
Outside of the foreign language learning world, you'll see that people who are kind of elitist about language, they tend to really rely on the written language.
They'll be like, ah, in the dictionary, it's not like that.
That's not the real conjugation.
It's not supposed to be that way when they're talking about the way people are actually speaking.
Because...
In every language, I don't think there's a lot of exceptions here.
And what do all of these have in common? The common denominator is that in all of these situations, Language is presented to you as something visual.
That is, something on a piece of paper, in a book, or on a board that you see with your eyes and interpret.
You did not learn your native language in this way.
By the time you were introduced to letters and reading and writing, you could already have complete conversations.
You could argue.
You could express your wants and desires and complain about things and talk about the weather.
And basically, you were a fluent speaker of your native language by the time you were taught how to spell your name.
So we need to ask ourselves, why is this suddenly reversed when it comes to learning a second or third or fourth language? When it comes to learning a foreign language, why do we start with writing before we can even speak? So that is essentially the main problem with traditional language learning.
And the reason that this is a problem, the reason this holds you back later on, is that language in essence is oral.
Language is oral.
And so what that means is I make sounds, I speak, and your ears hear me, and you interpret the things that I, the sounds that I make, and you understand me.
And you move your mouth, make sounds, I hear the sounds with my ears, and I interpret them, and I understand you.
So language in essence is oral.
Writing is simply a visual representation of the oral language.
And in the long history of language development and evolution, writing is really, really new.
Like if we think about language developing over thousands and thousands of years, being able to write something and use our eyes to interpret language is a relatively new phenomenon.
The mistake that traditional language learning methods make is treating the written language as the real language and the oral language as this thing that we do and it may or may not match to the written language which is like the real thing.
You'll also see this outside of the foreign language learning community.
Outside of the foreign language learning world, you'll see that people who are kind of elitist about language, they tend to really rely on the written language.
They'll be like, ah, in the dictionary, it's not like that.
That's not the real conjugation.
It's not supposed to be that way when they're talking about the way people are actually speaking.
Because...
In every language, I don't think there's a lot of exceptions here.
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3 of 9
The False Foundation Problem
The problem is not your language ability
Why Traditional Classes Start Wrong
Traditional classes reverse how humans learn languages
When Five Years Fail
Years of study can still fail communication
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