Can immersion really improve your speaking?
I often receive messages asking how to improve speaking.
Many people assume there must be a particular method that will dramatically improve their speaking within a few months. That is not how it works.
I went from barely being able to speak English to scoring 23 on the TOEFL speaking section by the time I graduated from college, then 28 this year. Throughout that entire process, I probably spent less than 10% of my time practicing speaking.
I am not saying that speaking requires no practice at all. But the process of improving it may be quite different from what you imagine.
This article covers two things: what actually drives improvement in speaking and how to train it through immersion. At the end, I will also share a practice method that reliably produces results.
My Experience
Let me start with my own experience to give you a clearer picture of how speaking improves.
I began immersing in my sophomore year of college. Before that, I had no immersion habit and no English-speaking environment. I could barely speak English, and my level was much like that of anyone who had learned conventional classroom English growing up.
Starting in my sophomore year, I spent several hours immersed in English every day and kept it up until my senior year, accumulating at least 2,000–3,000 hours over two years. During that period, I also worked deliberately on my pronunciation and learned to produce most phonemes reasonably accurately.
As I recall, my accent then was already quite similar to the way I sound now. It leaned more American at the time, whereas I now have a slight Australian accent. My fluency and ability to express myself, however, were still far below where they are today.
In my senior year, I spent about one or two months preparing for the TOEFL. I ultimately scored 108 overall, including 23 in speaking.
The important point is that I did very little speaking practice during those two years of immersion. Almost all of my time went into input, apart from occasionally correcting my pronunciation and talking to myself. Yet it was not just my listening and reading that improved dramatically; my speaking and writing improved as well.
A speaking score of 23 is not exceptionally high, but it is not something a complete beginner can achieve with a month or two of casual practice either.
I continued to maintain my immersion habit. Eight years later, this year, I took the TOEFL again. This time I scored 118 overall, with an equivalent speaking score of about 28.
My speaking is considerably better now than it was several years ago. Yet over those eight years, I still spent more than 95% of my time on immersion and relatively little on actual output.
I did speak more English during the year I lived in Australia from 2025 to 2026, but even then, I only spoke for extended periods when I went out with friends. Most of the time, I did not speak very much. I had already developed most of my English ability before moving abroad.
Many people assume that living abroad will automatically improve their spoken English. But without the immersion hours beforehand, living overseas for a year is unlikely to bring you to C2 or produce this kind of speaking score.
Comprehension Will Always Exceed Speaking
Now that I have shared my experience, I want to clarify a very basic idea: it is completely normal for your comprehension to exceed your speaking ability.
This is true even for native speakers. Linguists distinguish between receptive and productive vocabulary. Receptive vocabulary consists of words you understand when you hear or read them. Productive vocabulary consists of words you actually use when speaking or writing. In every language, native speakers have a far larger receptive vocabulary than productive vocabulary.
You can feel this for yourself in your first language. When you speak, you repeatedly use the same common words. But when you read an article or watch a video, you still understand many words you have never once spoken aloud.
So being better at understanding than expressing yourself does not mean there is anything wrong with your language ability. That gap is normal. Language also develops in a natural sequence: you understand a word or expression first, and only after enough encounters does it become part of what you can say.
Comprehension is the larger system; speaking develops from within it.
This also means your ability to express yourself cannot exceed your comprehension. Comprehension is the ceiling. Your speaking can approach it, but never rise above it.
When someone messages me to say, “I feel like I understand English, but I cannot really speak it,” I usually ask how many hours they have immersed. Very often, the answer is simply that they have not accumulated enough time.
In that case, a lack of speaking practice is not the problem. The ceiling itself is still low, and more speaking practice cannot raise you beyond it.
If you have not even reached 500 hours of immersion, there is no need to worry about speaking too soon. Focus on accumulating hours and raising the ceiling first. Your ability to express yourself will naturally grow with it.
Why Can You Understand but Not Speak?
You may still be wondering: If you simply keep immersing and taking in input, will your speaking improve by itself? If comprehension and expression are genuinely connected, why do so many people understand a language but struggle to speak it?
The key is that “understanding” comes in degrees.
What most people call understanding is still some distance from a native speaker's comprehension.
For example, imagine someone says:
You could've told me you were bringing someone.
If you catch only the keywords told me and bringing someone, you can still infer that someone brought another person along. You may feel that you understood, but in reality you might have understood only 30%.
If you understand the literal meaning but miss the blame or frustration conveyed by could've told me, along with the grammatical details that create that effect, you may still feel that you understood even though you caught only 60% of what was communicated.
Native-like comprehension also means hearing from the speaker's stress and tone whether they are angry, disappointed, surprised, or simply joking. Only then does your understanding approach 100%.
All three situations can be described as “understanding,” but the depth of comprehension is completely different.
That depth directly determines what you can say.
When you understand only 30%, your brain fills in the gaps and leaves you with the impression that you understood everything. But when it is your turn to speak, your usable vocabulary and grammar still reflect only the 30% you actually caught.
Only when you can hear the grammar, details, and tone of a sentence clearly do you have the foundation to express yourself naturally and accurately.
Two people may both feel that they understand, yet differ enormously in their ability to express themselves.
So when people say they understand but cannot speak, their comprehension often still has considerable room to improve. Only by making your comprehension more precise can you learn what sounds natural in the language and reproduce it accurately.
I often illustrate this with numbers: Speaking practice will have completely different effects for someone with 100 hours of immersion and someone with 1,000 hours.
No matter how much the person with 100 hours practices, they are unlikely to develop a natural accent or effortless grammar because their comprehension is not yet deep enough. The person with 1,000 hours, however, may quickly surpass them with only a little practice—or even none at all—because the necessary patterns are already familiar.
That is because immersion has already built a richer mental model of the language and much stronger comprehension.
This principle applies to our first language as well as any languages we learn later: we first develop a certain level of comprehension, then begin to master expression.
Babies are usually about one year old when they say their first meaningful word. By then, they have already heard a great deal of language.
The MacArthur–Bates vocabulary inventories, commonly used in research on infant language development, have found that babies aged eight to ten months can already understand dozens of words on average while producing virtually none. At around one year old, the number of words they understand is still roughly five to ten times the number they can say.
Even in our native language, comprehension leads and speaking gradually catches up. If you are worried that your speaking is not good enough, first ask whether your comprehension is developed enough to support it.
So How Do You Train Speaking?
None of this means that speaking requires no training. Beyond immersion itself, there are ways to help your speaking develop faster.
Step One: Identify Your Current Stage
If you have fewer than 500 hours of immersion, I can say with confidence that it is too early to worry about inadequate speaking.
Unlike some more extreme schools of immersion learning, I would not say that you must avoid speaking practice entirely at this stage. A little speaking practice can improve motivation and sometimes help you absorb more during immersion, so there is no harm in it. You can also use the method introduced below right away.
Just be prepared: your comprehension is still at an early stage, so your speaking is unlikely to improve dramatically in a short time.
At this stage, the priority is not finding a shortcut to better speaking. It is steadily accumulating immersion hours.
zeroStudy now works on mobile as well as desktop, and it automatically records all of your immersion time. If you do not yet know how to begin, start with The Complete Guide to Immersion Learning.
Step Two: Add Shadowing When the Time Is Right
Ideally, you would begin speaking practice only after immersion has taught you most of the grammar and you can understand most content—in other words, once your comprehension is close to fluent.
At that point, you have already internalized a great deal of grammar. Like a child acquiring a language, you can intuitively say simple things and gradually build from there, without translating from your first language into English and assembling unnatural sentences.
But reaching that level of comprehension—where you can understand most online content—takes at least 1,000 or even 2,000 hours of immersion. In my experience, most people do not have the patience to wait that long.
So I recommend starting a little earlier: after roughly 300–500 hours of immersion, you can add some shadowing practice to build your speaking more quickly.
A Specific Shadowing Method
The following is the shadowing method I teach in my language course.
It is simple: after listening to a sentence, look away from the subtitles and reproduce the entire sentence from memory.
Remember, the point is not to read the subtitles aloud. It is to rely on memory.
Why Is This Method So Effective?
As explained above, when we listen, we often catch only the keywords, miss a host of grammatical details, and still believe we understood.
This method forces you to capture every detail in the sentence. You must recall the entire sentence from memory, which means you have to notice details such as number, tense, and pronunciation before you can reproduce them. This forces your brain to process the sentence in full.
The length of the sentences you can reproduce accurately also provides a rough measure of your ability. If you can easily reproduce most long sentences, your level is already extremely high—perhaps close to that of a native speaker.
Try it in your first language. You will probably find it easy to repeat even very long sentences spoken by someone else. That is because you have fully internalized the grammar and already know every word in the sentence.
When you first practice in English, however, you may discover that your limit is only one or two words. That is because you have not yet internalized the grammar or stored many combinations of words as chunks. With sustained practice, though, you can gradually increase that length.
This exercise is highly effective but also exhausting, so ten to twenty minutes a day is plenty. You can also see the total number of sentences you have shadowed in the zeroStudy dashboard.
After shadowing, spend the rest of your time immersing as usual. Together, the two activities form a highly effective way to develop your speaking.
Summary
That is the complete method for improving your speaking. If you are dissatisfied with your speaking right now, follow these two steps:
- Check whether you have accumulated enough immersion time. If not, make immersion your priority.
- Once you have built enough hours and comprehension, use Advanced Shadowing to train your speaking.
If you have any questions about immersion learning, feel free to message me on LINE.
For a more detailed explanation, see my language course. I also offer paid one-on-one consultations and coaching.