About Broken Fluency

Broken Fluency was made with a specific kind of person in mind: one who understands a language well, maybe even fully, but struggles to speak it with ease or confidence.

If you can follow conversations, watch films, read articles, or understand native speakers, yet freeze when it’s your turn to talk, you’re not alone. And it's not your fault either.

I'm the same. And many of us end up in this place after years of passive exposure.

Maybe you grew up hearing Spanish around the house.
Maybe you went to school in another country.
Maybe you used to watch German cartoons.

The result? Uneven knowledge, and that frustrating feeling of knowing a language you can't speak. You always feel like you're almost there, but it feels impossible to actually fully get there.

Some things feel advanced, others feel strangely missing, and most learning systems don’t know what to do with that.

This is what I call Broken Fluency

Broken Fluency was created because most language tools assume a neat progression:

Beginner → Intermediate → Advanced → Fluent.

But in the real world, that's not how a second language is learned. And a lot of the time, you don't start from scratch.

Here, levels are not the starting point. Systems are.

the gap between understanding and speaking
why common apps and courses stop working at certain stages
how to design learning approaches that fit real-world knowledge
and how to turn passive knowledge into active use

Much of the exploration here is grounded in first-person experience, experimentation, and evidence-informed thinking. I'm in the same boat as you, on my own journey to fluency.

Some things have helped me, some have done more harm than good. Hopefully, you just take the good stuff.

The goal here isn't fluency as a badge. It's functional, usable language that will actually serve you and make you happy. Broken Fluency is not about speed, hacks, or motivation.

It’s about respecting how you learn a language.

If you’ve ever felt stuck between knowing and speaking, this space is for you.

A personal note on perspective

This site is written by someone who understands a second language well but learned it unevenly.

Much of my own language learning happened informally, through exposure, media, and use, rather than structured courses. That made understanding come early, while speaking lagged in ways that most systems aren't built to work with.

Broken Fluency grew out of trying to make sense of that gap: experimenting, reading, discarding what didn’t work, and slowly building approaches that respected what my knowledge was rather than how it was supposed to be.

This site is both a record of that thinking and a resource for others navigating something similar. It's a quiet, ongoing project. It’s meant to be used, not consumed.

Why understanding a language doesn't automatically lead to speaking (and what to do with that)

Read the article