You are a BEGINNER if you don’t know a lot of vocabulary, if you can’t hold a conversation, or if you can’t understand when native speakers use basic vocabulary. Basic vocabulary is stuff like greetings, food, weather, numbers, people, animals, colors, vocabulary for daily items and activities, and basic sentence structure.
At this level, listen and speak as much as possible. You need a lot of repetition. Think about when we learn our native language as babies and toddlers. (A toddler is a child that is 2-3 years old.) Their mom has to say the same thing over and over and eventually the child will start understanding and then repeating - trying to imitate - what the mother says.
They are not punished for saying things incorrectly. There’s a lot of positive reinforcement even if the word they say is not even close to the target word. You don’t need a teacher to correct you at this stage. Rather, you need to train yourself to pay attention when your teacher speaks. Your job is to imitate. Techniques like listen-and-repeat and shadowing are great.
So listening is the most important skill at first. And this doesn’t mean watching English movies with subtitles, although that can help a little later on. It means listening to very low-level conversation. Basic boring sentences about basic boring vocabulary. If you are listening at a level that is too high for you, you’re not going to be able to focus on the basics and you’ll end up wasting your time. If you try to go too fast, you’ll end up going slow.
The challenge is finding the right person to work with because teachers don’t actually teach this way, and most of them don’t know how. If you’re interested in learning more about the method, search “Language Acquisition.”
Don’t focus on reading or writing at first. Focus on understanding when native speakers speak and focus on imitating their pronunciation.
You don’t need perfectly native pronunciation. But you need to be understood. If your pronunciation is too bad, people will not understand you no matter how much grammar and vocabulary you have, no matter how fluent you get. You need to build good pronunciation habits early, because bad habits are harder to break later.
