Why I can't speak English Part 1 A couple days ago, I had a major breakthrough in understanding why I cannot speak a foreign language, in my case – English. I spent 25 years learning English words, but the way I did it was purely for being able to translate from English to Russian. Read any “top 10 secret ways of learning English” article; they say: listen podcasts, read newspapers, watch movies with subtitles… However, the problem is that these means cannot help you to learn speaking, because all these means only practice your ability to understand and translate. And this is exactly what I did my whole life. There was always a very thoughtful idea, which I never comprehend sufficiently. Sometimes you encounter the idea that you do not need to know every single word of the target language, instead, certain number of most popular words is quite enough to be able to speak. However, my understanding of this idea was that knowing 300-500 words would enable you to ask directions, to order meal, etc but not more. Fortunately, I realized that this idea is much more deep and meaningful. Recently I bumped into an interview from a Bloomberg journalist who had a live stream with a studio, talking about G20 event and I listened to both the journalist and an anchorman very carefully. What I realized amazed me. They used unbelievably simple words, which I would describe as Top-500 [of the most used words in English] in best case, maybe Top-1000.