What is Heritage speaker?
A heritage speaker grew up hearing a language at home — from parents or grandparents — without full formal education in it. The result is a distinctive profile: native-sounding ears and accent, everyday fluency, but often gaps in literacy, formal registers and 'school' vocabulary.
Heritage speakers frustrate standard courses: beginner classes bore them, advanced classes assume literacy they may lack. Their real needs are usually reading/writing, formal register, and confidence — the home language often carries emotional weight and judgment fear.
The hidden superpower: pronunciation and listening are largely already installed. Reactivating a heritage language is dramatically faster than learning from zero — the foundations were poured in childhood.
What it means for your speaking
For heritage speakers, judgment-free conversation is the unlock: a patient partner who won't laugh at the 'kitchen vocabulary' gaps lets childhood foundations carry adult conversations surprisingly fast.
Practise out loud — 30 seconds a day →