Speak in a low voice and not many people will hear you. Whisper and only one or two will hear. Unless someone is reading your lips. Then you might as well be talking out loud or even shouting.

I attended a wonderful wedding and reception this past weekend. Happiness was everywhere. Balloons stuck to the ceiling and their ribbons hung down like a colorful drizzle. All the tables were adorned perfectly, and the people who sat at them were speaking and smiling and enjoying the festivities, the dreams of the new couple, the reunion of families, and the food and drink.

My niece looked across the large room and noticed some of the workers whispering. They might as well have been shouting. Clear across that room, my hard-of-hearing, 15-year-old niece read their lips as clearly as if they were at our table.

“Those people over there are complaining,” she said. They thought their conversation was private. It might as well have been recorded with spy equipment, because people who are used to reading lips don’t need to hear to know what is spoken.

Speech is more than words. It is more than vocabulary and grammar. It is what you are saying with all of your self. And it is more than sound. It’s on our face, in our hands, in our chest and legs, on our lips. It can be loud or quiet or even silent. But silence is loud enough to the deaf who read the speech on someone’s lips.

Most of us are always producing language, often communicating more than we intend. We see it in each other. The deaf aren’t the only ones reading inaudible language. We all read each other like books. We do in fact read each other’s minds by means of facial expressions and body language. Language is a very large thing, very complex. No wonder it takes so much effort to learn another language in this kind of depth that puts you on equal footing with native speakers.

I used to work for a boss who returned from a trip out of the country and told me what he sort of learned in Spanish: “A beer, Miss.” Una cerveza, señorita. I repeated the sentence with Spanish pronunciation, and he said, “Oh, you’re just being technical.”

He wasn’t interested in saying even one sentence right. People who want to be fluent in a language usually want to sound like they’re speaking the actual language instead of a distant imitation of it. If you feel that fluency comes with difficulty, it’s because so much has to happen in the brain to get those words rolling out.

I tell students to be patient with themselves for at least three reasons when they are working toward fluency:

1. Fluent speakers have their mouths two or three syllables ahead of what they say at the moment. It takes time to rewire your head to process another language that way, but you most definitely, without question, certainly, no doubt can. If you will be patient.

2. Fluent speakers have learned to think in ways that a given language requires. They don’t put a new language into all the old patterns. Be patient with yourself while you rewire your brain to think new ways.

3. Fluent speakers master small amounts of vocabulary at a time. They may pound their head with more, but they master a small amount at a time, using it in daily life.

Language learning is not easy or fast or always fun, but it’s always good.