Of course you need to speak to get good at speaking, I don't think that's what the original poster meant. But rather that you should focus on comprehension initially,because there's not really much point to speaking to someone if you don't know what you want to say and cannot understand the response.
When you're learning another language, there'll be countless times where you're like "ohhhh, I understand this." Then the moment you open your mouth, you'll get pretty directly told, "No, you completely misunderstood." You'll also encounter people who immediately correct your mistakes when speaking, whether they're grammatical or misusages of words.
As an example that people here might better grasp, learning a language without speaking is like learning a programming language without writing your own code. You might generally recognize the syntax and usage of various functions, but you won't truly grasp it and understand its nuances until you sit down, write, and accept that you'll make mistakes and identify them.
I agree, but active engagement does not require speaking or writing. Listening and reading are not necessarily passive. You don't need to know how to write fluently to be able to read fluently and comprehend something, and I don't need to say something to be able to understand it. Can mute people not understand spoken word as well as people who can speak?
>As an example that people here might better grasp, learning a language without speaking is like learning a programming language without writing your own code.
>You might generally recognize the syntax and usage of various functions, but you won't truly grasp it and understand its nuances until you sit down, write, and accept that you'll make mistakes and identify them.
You'd need someone to correct your mistakes for this to work. And that can help, sure, but you can definitely internalize the correct usage of phrases, etc, from reading and listening to it being done correctly as well. Doing something incorrectly (which you will most likely do without a highly developed model of how the language works in practice) will not help on it's own.
If you're not practicing output, you're not truly comprehending. Output, whether it be speech, writing, or signing, is how you get and demonstrate confirmation that you comprehend.
This also implies you cannot understand a language without people who can speak it to you. You can learn to read books without reading them out to someone who tells you what they mean.
Honestly, this doesn't even really make sense considering my own experience of going from not comprehending stuff like shows and podcasts to being able to almost completely understand everything being said a lot of times, without any real practice speaking to people. Unless you want to claim that I'm not actually understanding anything at all :).