This is how you overcome a language barrier

People are patient, people aren't judging you. How do you get to speaking? We are all nervous, of course, when we start speaking. Of course you haven't done it before. You don't know what you're going to be able to say. So to me, I think there are a number of things that we can do. First of all, don't start with grammar because if you have a, a sort of a grammar heavy type of learning process, you're going to be forever thinking about grammar rules when you try to speak. And that's very bad because it's very difficult to speak and get your ideas out. And at the same time try and refer back to your recollection of what the grammar rule was. You have to develop habits naturally. So I get back to this idea of listening and reading and in particular I find to sort of make it easier to get into speaking, I have found our many stories at length, for example, these repetitive, these stories with a lot of repetition, they get me going. You know, we measure the number of words we know at length. So I used to wait like with Russian, I think I went like nine months before I started speaking Czech, I went six months and I waited till I had like 10,000 words. But once we have the mini stories where I have listened to stuff repetitively and it's high frequency verbs and I've listened over and over again, I found that I was able to start speaking after, you know, 3000 words. Now when you start speaking, you're going to struggle. However, if you have invested in a lot of listening and reading, you have a better chance of understanding what the person says. And that's the absolute most important thing. If you don't understand what they're saying, you can't have a conversation. If you understand what they're saying, you feel more comfortable. Now you can struggle to try and piece back an answer using the the words that you are able to use. And if you continue doing that, you'll get better and better at it. But in any case, you should never worry about making mistakes. Obviously if you're with a teacher or you're paying a tutor online, you know you're paying them, so making mistakes doesn't matter. But even if you're interacting with people for real, you know you're going to a store or something, people are patient, people aren't judging you. So and, and The thing is that if you don't make mistakes, you won't improve. So you have to be prepared to make mistakes because you'll remember the mistakes. Some of them you'll remember what you had trouble saying. And then you'll notice that when you next listen and read. So you have to continue the listening and reading and then you go out there and you, you know, it's like you play a game now you've been practicing, you play a game, you made a few mistakes, you, you know, withdraw, go through your listening and reading again, start to notice things. And that's just the process of developing fluency in the language. But you're not going to start off, you know, just fluent. However, the more you invest in listening and reading initially before you start speaking, in my opinion, and even after you start speaking, you have to continue investing in the listening and reading so that you can improve your your level of familiarity with the language so that you develop good habits and don't rely on remembering the grammar rules.