Scared to speak English?

Speaking anxiety often stems from internal factors rather than actual linguistic ability, as demonstrated by BBC journalist Hanan Razek, who struggled with basic interactions like ordering coffee despite being professionally assessed as fluent. These difficulties frequently arise from irrational beliefs and low self-perceptions, where learners fear negative evaluation and feel unable to project their true personality through a foreign tongue. Such psychological barriers are considered internal factors because they originate within the speaker's mind rather than from the external environment. While the English language contains roughly one million words, the average native speaker utilizes only 20,000 to 30,000 in daily communication, suggesting that high-level fluency requires less vocabulary than many learners assume. Overcoming this stress involves accepting mistakes as a natural part of the learning process and recognizing that the perceived judgment from others is often a logical fallacy.