I’ve been learning Romanian for nearly 2 weeks now, but the same question can be applied to any language I guess. How long was it before you went from “I know 250 individual words” to “I can string these words together to create sentences have have a basic conversation with someone”?
I’m at the stage now where I can probably understand a basic beginner conversation, but being able to formulate my responses in real time on the fly and speak quickly is not there yet.
I still have to stop, think carefully about word order, how words change based on tense, gender etc, how the pronunciation of the word actually sounds.
I’m trying not to get discouraged as it’s early days but at some point I hope I get to a stage where I know so many words off by heart and how sentences are structured, that I can start creating my own brand new sentences.
The premise of the question fails to account for how the process of language learning works. To be completely honest, knowing a few hundred words was already enough to start “actually speaking”, but by that I mean to have very basic conversations like “Hi, how are you, where are the toilets, thank you, where are you from” etc. It’s less of “can’t speak” and “can speak” switch to a gradient from being able to talk about only basic things, to building up over time, until gradually I am able to go out and do pretty much any task and have any conversation I want in my target language. The 80-20 rule applies here. The majority of human interactions will be made up of the most common words that a beginner knows, but the minority of words used per conversation come from a much bigger pool that takes much longer to learn, which is why most language learners hit a plateau of sorts as the marginal gain per word learned decreases rapidly.
I feel like you kind of skipped over the core problem about what I’m experiencing.
Knowing 250 words is not the same as being able to construct 20 grammatically accurate sentences, because when you make a sentence, you need to consider word order, how the word changes based on if it’s a man or female speaking or past tense present tense etc.
An example in English you might know how to say the following words “I” “am” “going” “to” “the” “shops” “do” “you” “need” “anything”
But when you try to say that sentence in real time, you may end up producing “I am to the going shops you do anything need”
Because knowing words is not the same as knowing grammar.
The problem here is being grammatically accurate and speaking is also two completely different skills. In all three languages I can speak at a comfortable advanced level, including my native language, I make grammatical mistakes all the time, which means I “actually speak” zero languages. This isn’t to diminish the importance of grammar, but the point is to illustrate that you shouldn’t beat yourself up over grammatical mistakes, especially if its your second language. Fluency and grammatical accuracy are different skills, in fact I am sure if you look closely, you can find grammatical mistakes in pretty much everything I post, and so what?