In my experience (and my teacher's), vocabulary is the biggest obstacle to understanding and being understood. I'm learning Turkish now, and I'm trying to do 40

In my experience (and my teacher's), vocabulary is the biggest obstacle to understanding and being understood. I'm learning Turkish now, and I'm trying to do 40 words/day. It turns out, in the languages I know, you can usually follow Subject + verb infinitive + object and people will understand. Of course, grammar is important, but I hate it when I have to say "he is very good" instead of "he is quite good" because I don't know the right word. I've heard that you need 3000 words to be reasonably comfortable in a language. With 40 words/day, that's still 3 months, which should be enough to pick up grammar if you actually talk to people and study a bit on the side.