I try to find a trick that gets me up and speaking to people as quickly as possible. In Spanish, for example, if you can conjugate poder, you can say pretty mu

I try to find a trick that gets me up and speaking to people as quickly as possible. In Spanish, for example, if you can conjugate poder, you can say pretty much anything. It's a get-out-of-conjugation-free card because it flips the rest of your sentence into the infinitive. "Is it possible to pay?", "Is it possible for us to go to the beach?". You can structure most any sentence this way and avoid having to deal with tense, subject, conjugation, etc. I'm learning French now, and getting a ton of mileage out of je voudrais. For the same reasons. The infinitive helps a lot too. "It is very important for me to..." Naturally, you sound a bit foolish speaking this way, but it gets your point across and gets you talking to people. Think of all those eastern Europeans you meet with their crazy sentence structure, word choice, tenses, etc. But you understand what they're saying, right? That's the way forward, I think. Just get to the point where you're saying things and being understood. Conjugation, tense, grammar, etc. don't necessarily move the needle there, and can thus be skipped and left for the "polishing" stage that comes later.