Driven by national strategies, China's foreign language education is transitioning from theoretical importation to local construction, with building an independent knowledge system becoming key to the discipline's development. Constructing an independent knowledge system for foreign language education must be based on real issues in China's foreign language education practice, addressing genuine problems through precise and systematic diagnosis to achieve a knowledge system that is rooted, practical, and soulful. The core essence of an independent knowledge system includes local relevance, originality, systematicity, and openness. Uncovering real problems requires assembling teams across academic stages and fields, systematically organizing them through four steps: comprehensive research, classification and coding, prioritization, and iterative optimization. Building an independent knowledge system for China's foreign language education is a dynamic, bidirectional process of practice-theory-repractice-retheory, requiring the integration of diverse practices and multidimensional theories.