The rough benchmark for fluency in most languages is somewhere around 10,000 words.

The bar for carrying on everyday conversations is much lower, at 1,000-3,000 words, while you may be able to get by–with the help of some miming and sign language–with as little as a few hundred.

With these benchmarks in mind, learning a language seems to be a straightforward proposition.

All you need to do is continually increase your vocabulary, progressively hitting each of the word count milestones en route to fluency. Many language learning apps even display this vocabulary data for you so you, making it easy to track your progression.

And yet…

If you’ve ever tried to learn another language, especially using a tool like Duolingo, you know that this is not how language learning actually works.

Vocabulary building, it turns out, is only of three essential components of language learning. And while it’s an essential part of gaining fluency, vocab-building can’t get you there alone.

You might not currently be trying to learn Portuguese, Swahili, or Mandarin but Creative Fluency is essential to create work that speaks to and resonates with our intended audience.

Unfortunately, much like a traditional language, we, as creators tend to overemphasize the importance of vocabulary when learning how to make and market our creative work.

If we want to achieve Creative Fluency, we need to expand our approach beyond vocab-building alone and place greater emphasis on the additional two, oft-neglected aspects of learning a language.

Building Your Foundational Vocabulary

Vocabulary alone may not be enough to get us to fluency, but without it, there would be no language at all.

As such, learning a basic, foundational vocabulary is still the necessary starting point when it comes to learning a new language.

When it comes to a traditional language, vocab-building consists of:

• Learning the basic building blocks of the language such as the sounds and alphabet it uses
• Rewiring your brain to apply new words to familiar concepts
• Memorization & retention of the new bank of words
• Learning how the language works on a technical level, including conjugation, tenses, and sentence structure

When it comes to Creative Fluency, we can think of building our vocabulary as:

• Learning the basic building blocks such as the various tools and tactics available to us
• Rewiring our brains to understand which levers will trigger which results
• Memorization & retention of the various tips and strategies we might one day need
• Understanding how our creative vocabulary fits into higher level theories, frameworks and mental models

Vocab-building is the most straightforward part of learning a new language as it aligns with how our education system conditions us to learn anything; read the material, and memorize it.

As a result, building up our vocabulary is the most intuitive, easiest, and most enjoyable part.

This ease, however, is also why we tend to overemphasize its importance, ignoring the other two aspects of becoming fluent and leaving us stuck, unable to communicate effectively.

Language is More than a Collection of Words

And yet, this is exactly what focusing solely on vocabulary leaves us with.

Using Duolingo, I’ve (supposedly) built up vocabularies of 1000+ words in both Spanish and Portuguese.

And yet, when I’ve visited countries that use these languages, I’ve found time and again that while I can recognize and read a large number of words when it comes to communicating in the heat of the moment, I’m almost entirely incapable.

Clearly, vocabulary isn’t everything.

The Asaro tribe of Papua New Guinea have a proverb that encapsulates the problem perfectly, saying “Knowledge is only a rumour until it lives in the muscle.”

To take the next step towards fluency, then we need to develop our muscle memory around our vocabulary to the point that we can speak without thinking.

The only way to achieve this level of proficiency is by getting out and practicing using our vocabulary–limited though it may be–in the wild.

Of course, practicing in public is inherently uncomfortable, which is why we avoid it.

We feel safer continuing to build up vocabulary in private before even thinking about venturing out into the world. And so we attempt to learn every possible word and phrase that might be required of us in advance in order to avoid any potential awkward or embarrassing situations.

And yet, awkwardness and embarrassment are entirely unavoidable when it comes to learning a language.

Ask any prolific language learner about their method and they’ll tell you some variation on this advice from Benny Lewis, an Irish polyglot, “Speak like Tarzan, don’t be embarrassed & aim to make 200 mistakes a day.”

The same concept applies to achieving Creative Fluency.

As with traditional language, we often perceive that the thing holding us back is a lack of vocabulary.

We feel like if we just learn one more tactic or pick up one more tool, we’ll finally find the missing piece and things will finally start to work for us. And so we continue to add more tools and tactics hodgepodge to our vocabulary, hoping that one of them will help us communicate effectively.

The thing is, while we’ll certainly need to continue to expand our vocabulary over time, our existing vocabulary is likely more than enough to begin clumsily communicating in the wild.

Yes it will be uncomfortable.

Yes we’ll make a lot of mistakes.

But it will also accelerate our learning (and thus our results) in a big way.

For one, when we step out of the classroom and into the streets we quickly realize that we don’t quite know our existing vocabulary as well as we thought we did.

Though we might have run through the words and phrases a thousand times in our head, when it comes to speaking them out loud, they stick in our mouths.

Learning in public, however, brings with it pressure to improve quickly and we soon learn proper pronunciation, fix our mistakes, and rapidly expand our vocabulary to boot.

This is helped along by the fact that by practicing in public, you expose yourself to people who are more than happy to help you learn, correcting your mistakes, giving you the right word when you need it, and encouraging you to keep at it.

And it’s here, with this type of person-to-person interaction that language starts to feel fun.

The promise of fluency–and all communication for that matter–is connection and Creative Fluency is no different. Because at its core, great creative work is never a recitation but a conversation.

As we build up the muscle memory around our language and gain the ability to string together our thoughts and ideas, we build the basis for effective communication.

But before we can contribute meaningfully to the conversations taking place around us, there’s a final step we must take.

Unfortunately, it’s one many creators never learn.

Developing Your Ear

Counterintuitively, the final, and most crucial part of fluency has nothing to do with speaking.

Instead, it’s about learning to listen and understand what is being said.

With some basic vocabulary, we may be able to express ourselves effectively. But without the understanding of what’s being said around or to us, we’re incapable of carrying on an actual conversation. As a result, we end up simply adding more noise to the world without context or nuance.

Understanding the conversation that we’re a part of allows us to respond appropriately and open up a two-way dialogue.

This, of course, is the foundation of spoken communication but is also the basis of successful creative work.

Your Work Doesn’t Exist In a Void

We’re all creating and publishing our work in a world filled with countless conversations already taking place.

It’s true, we can attempt to start a new conversation around our work but the easiest way to gain traction is to tap into an existing conversation and plug our work into it.

This is where developing our ear comes in.

Anyone who’s ever learned another language has more than a few stories about embarrassing themselves, thinking they understood a conversation before jumping in and realizing they were way off.

“When I was first learning Spanish,” Shares author Mark Manson, “I once told a group of people that Americans put a lot of condoms in their food. Later, I told a girl that basketball makes me horny. Um, yeah… It’s going to happen. Trust me.”

Sometimes the price of this lack of understanding is simply embarrassment. Sometimes, it may result in confrontation, hurt feelings, or a tarnished reputation. And sometimes it results in the weary, withering looks from locals tired of another foreigner jumping into a discussion about local affairs without understanding the history or the nuance*.

*Most novice marketers have experienced this reaction at one time or another

Understanding the context of the conversation we’re a part of allows us to engage and build community authentically, and create offers and content that solve real problems in the most effective way possible.

Developing Your Ear Takes Time & Patience

Self-study does a poor job preparing us for the speed and variety of pronunciations we encounter out in the world, and at first, we struggle to keep up and react in time with what’s happening.

And yet, the point of learning any language in the first place is to engage and participate in the environment in which it’s spoken.

This means that sooner or later, we need to immerse ourselves, learning not by studying but by watching, listening, absorbing, and making our own stumbling attempts at contributing.

The process is slow, awkward, and frustrating at first.

Until it isn’t.

Immerse yourself long enough to get past the initial discomfort and over time, almost without realizing it, your comprehension improves, your vocabulary grows, and you’ll find yourself able to string together complex thoughts and ideas without thinking.

Soon your pocket dictionary sits gathering dust in a corner and with enough practice, you achieve and surpass fluency, pushing the boundaries of the existing language and developing some clever turns of phrase of your own.

It’s impossible to reach this level of fluency through study alone.

So ditch the apps, the podcasts, blogs, and newsletters (even this one if you must) and take your vocabulary, limited though it may be into the world.

Sure, you’ll need to mime, you’ll need to cobble together thoughts without the exact right word. But what you’ll quickly find is that effective communication, in creative work as in life, is a lot more about effort, intent, and ingenuity, than having the perfect word for every occasion.

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This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.

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