Talk the Hind Leg Off a Donkey

We are talking about talking, the most basic form of communication. Even the cats which wail at night are doing just that, though in a far less sophisticated way than we humans. Talking is a mixture of listening and speaking. One person speaks, the other listens, and then responds in speech. Effective communication happens when speaker and listener create the same pictures in their heads. For this to happen the listener really tunes in to what is being said, and the speaker chooses their language carefully.
This may seem really hard in your new language. But there are two things you can do which will really help:
1. Listen carefully for patterns of language that speakers are using and mimic and adapt.
2. Learn to make the most of what you do know. Some of that is to do with gesture and expression, rather than actual words.
Practice makes perfect, and if you can practise with another member of your group, great. Take a basic conversation form your course book, and go over it hundreds of times. To break the monotony, do it with different voices and in different moods. Then change a few words which are easy to change – ask for a kilo of pears instead of a pound of apples.
A problem sometimes occurs. You say something really well, so they come back at you in a torrent. Don’t let them! Insist, insist and insist again that they speak slowly and that they make their meaning clear. The Spanish, incidentally, are very good at this. See how they deal with tourists. They only use a few words of English, French, Dutch or whatever else. Then they use mime and gesture. You can request your native speaker to do that too… possibly by miming and gesturing.
All is possible of you really want to communicate.
(See The Complete Guide to Learning a Language, “Talk the Hind Leg Off a Donkey”)