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You struggle to express your ideas smoothly in English because the ideas in your mind are in Chinese. Imagine being able to play only the piano. You have many songs in your head, like Michael Jackson's "Beat it." Now, suppose I ask you to play that song on the guitar. Even though you have the melody in your head, you can't play it on another instrument. You've only learned this melody on the piano, so you can only play it there.

Don't waste time and money paying for conversations with native speakers for the called speaking practice. To improve your speaking, you must first improve your listening. Your speaking can only be as good as your listening, or even worse, but never better. Almost nobody goes to a language school to practice their listening as they know it's a waste of time and money. Those language teachers may be fluent in English, however they lack the experience or knowledge to discuss your ideas, major, or job. Thus, how should speaking be taught? Can words be put in students' mouths? What does speaking practice mean? Moving the muscles of the mouth? It doesn't make sense.

If you can understand everything you hear, you will be able to speak. Just listen to content you enjoy and use dictionaries. It's very intuitive. However, what's not intuitive is that if you want to improve your listening faster, you need to read. Reading is able to improve your listening skill directly. Listening is essential, and reading speeds up the process. This is the biggest difference between how children and adults learn. It's the biggest advantage adults have over children.

The argument for listening being more important is based on the fact that babies start with listening. Yes, babies start with listening. No doubt about that. But we're not babies. We're adults.

Babies spend 3-4 years intensely listening before they start speaking in full sentences. Children are full-time language learners. That's their main job. And let's not forget they have at least one, sometimes even three or four full-time private teaers—parents, grandparents, and so on. All children do is eat, play, sleep, and learn their native language for at least 8 hours a day, 365 days a year, for about 4-5 years. That's at least 12,000 hours of intensive listening. Do you have 12,000 hours at your disposal? Keep in mind, babies don't listen to CDs or videos. They listen to real people. That's very different.

Reading is more effective. Reading is always faster than listening. It's the same in our native language. Reading exposes you to the language more than listening does. It's much easier to understand new words, notice grammar, and everything else. Rereading is faster than replaying. With listening, you need to pause, and play again. It takes longer to figure things out.

Reading and dictionaries are our main advantages over children. Let me be clear: it's not a choice between reading or listening. Both are crucial. The point I made earlier is to help you prioritize correctly. It's about finding the right balance between reading and listening. People spend too much time on listening, passively listening or watching videos. For most people, the reading-to-listening ratio is 1:9. I believe the right ratio should be at least 2:1, or even better, 3:1. For every 30 minutes of listening, spend at least 1 hour reading.

The confusion and dislike people have for reading is mainly from too much textbooks, boring lexical resources and grammar books. What you should pay attention to is that, we're not in the 20th century. This is the 21st century. Find informative and interesting content and read it daily on the Internet. It's better to find something useful for your job or school major, something related to your profession rather than just for hobbies. Books and articles about your job or major. Read and listen to informative content. That's right, not useless videos. Listen to something informative, but reading is more efficient for input.