Most people believe their problem is vocabulary. If I just knew more words, I could say more.
Worth testing, because if it's wrong you're solving the wrong problem — and for the overwhelming majority of learners past the first few months, it's wrong.
Run the Test
Think of the last time a conversation failed. Reconstruct what you wanted to say.
Now ask: did you know the words? Not could you have produced them at speed — did you know them?
Nearly always, yes. The sentence was made of ordinary vocabulary you'd recognise instantly on a page. What failed wasn't the inventory. It was getting it out in the time available.
The Actual Constraint
A conversation gives you well under a second to begin responding. Producing a sentence from separately-stored components takes several.
That's the whole problem, and adding vocabulary doesn't touch it. A larger inventory retrieved at the same speed produces exactly the same silence — you'll simply have more words you can't reach in time.
Which is why people with substantial vocabularies still can't speak, and why it feels unfair. They did the work. The work just wasn't aimed at the constraint.
The Cost of Solving the Wrong Problem
Specifically: months spent adding items to a store that's already large enough for everyday conversation, while retrieval speed stays exactly where it is.
Everyday speech runs on a surprisingly small set of high-frequency phrases. You almost certainly recognise the vast majority of them already. The gap between recognising them and producing them is where the entire problem lives, and no amount of new vocabulary narrows it.
What to Do Instead
Take the words you already have and make a small number of complete phrases automatic.
Not more words. Fewer, deeper. The measure that matters is how many things you can say without assembling them — and for most people that number is currently near zero, despite a large vocabulary.
About Outputly
Outputly doesn't teach you more words. It takes high-frequency phrases built from vocabulary you already recognise and makes them come out at conversational speed.