What if we just started… talking?
On knowing the words, finding them too late, and making room for speaking.
Picture this. You’re buying a coffee in German.
You’ve ordered. They’ve understood. Things are going suspiciously well.
Then comes a follow-up question. You understand that too. You even know what you want to say.
But you can’t quite get it out.
The person behind the counter switches to English. You finish the transaction. Somewhere outside, your answer finally arrives.
It’s tempting to take that moment as evidence that you haven’t learnt much. But there’s another question worth asking: what, exactly, have you been practising?
When you listen or read, you’re comprehending language someone else has supplied. Speech production asks you to retrieve words from memory, organise them into a sentence and say it. That act of bringing something to mind is recall.
And the other person is still standing there.
Conversation moves at a frankly unreasonable speed. Research on turn-taking puts typical gaps between speakers at around a fifth of a second—shorter than the time needed to plan even a simple spoken response from scratch. Researchers argue that we often prepare our answers while the other person is still talking. Levinson and Torreira, 2015
Which makes “I understood everything, so why couldn’t I answer?” a rather less mysterious question.
Understanding matters. Of course it does. But a conversation asks you to retrieve and use what you know, on a schedule you don’t entirely control.
In one experiment, people learning a small artificial language practised either producing it or comprehending it. The production group later did better on comprehension tests too. A lab study isn’t a conversation in Zürich, but it suggests speaking can contribute to learning—not simply demonstrate what you’ve already learnt. Hopman and MacDonald, 2018
One part of that work is retrieval: finding words and structures without being given the answer. Deliberately practising that recall is called retrieval practice. A prompt gives you something to express; you have to supply the language. Karpicke and Roediger, 2008
You’ve learnt to say you want a coffee. Now say you don’t want one. Ask whether your friend wants one. Say you’d like one, but not right now.
The vocabulary stays familiar, but each prompt asks you to say something different, or the same thing differently. Language is complicated that way. You have to recall what you know and work out how to put it together.
Return to those prompts later, without the answers in front of you, and you practise retrieving the language again. You’re repeating the work of finding and using it, with enough variation to make you think.
So what would learning look like if we deliberately made room for that process?
It wouldn’t mean throwing a beginner into a conversation and hoping for the best. “Just talk” is fairly useless advice when you don’t yet have anything to work with.
It would mean structured speaking practice: start with language you know, respond to a prompt, then vary what you’re asked to say. A teacher—or a lesson designed around it—gives you time to respond, a cue when you’re stuck and feedback you can use on the next attempt.
Those awkward first attempts become part of the work: retrieval, sentence construction and speaking aloud. A pause is something you can work through, rather than a verdict on whether you’re any good at languages.
Speaking becomes part of learning, rather than something you hope to be ready for afterwards.
That’s the idea we’re working on with Echoa.
We’d quite like the answer to arrive while we’re still in the café.