What you say is true if mastery of the foreign language is required or the aim of the exercise. However, if you just want to order breakfast abroad without look

What you say is true if mastery of the foreign language is required or the aim of the exercise. However, if you just want to order breakfast abroad without looking like an uncultured insensitive dick, translating sentences formed in your native language works just fine. Nobody expects people to master five-or-so languages, but putting at least some effort into learning the local language is usually greatly appreciated. Furthermore, depending on the degree of similarity between your native language and the “target“ language, forming sentences first and then translating them will actually get you pretty far – surely it will be useless if you speak, say, Finnish natively and want to learn some East Asian language, but I imagine it to work decently between, say, English and Dutch or Spanish and Italian. Even English and German share enough history that most sentences can be translated one-to-one.