Speaking a language involves two key features: creation and cooperation. Creation entails building your own sentences to serve what you want to communicate, while cooperation refers to the dynamic relationship between the speaker and the listener. Both things go hand-in-hand to create a fruitful interaction.

The creativity that speaking a language entails is one of the main reasons why it’s best to give yourself time before using it in the real world. While memorized phrases are helpful, committing them verbatim are seldom sufficient to successfully hold your own even in the most basic settings.

Even if you only manage to master twenty of the most frequently used words in a month, that will be enough to afford you some creativity in the field. Paired with memorized phrases, you can construct enough proper conversation materials to be able to communicate what you need.

Cooperation involves the dynamic of understanding the speaker and returning their efforts, in order to complete the interaction. While that’s the natural course of things, it becomes difficult to achieve when one of the parties doesn’t have the necessary skills in the language (e.g. you’re only on the first lesson of your language education software). While it’s not impossible, the work required on the part of the both parties tend to be too much.

So what’s the point? You have to keep this two things in mind when preparing to use the target language in a real-world setting. Be prepared to be creative and be cooperative. That’s the only way to get things done.