I started learning a new language by making up questions for one of my buddies who happens to speak that language. (FYI, it's French & Pierre.) The initial process caused me to have got more or less used to and comfortable about what I call "logic-driven language acquisition".

What I mean by "logic-driven":

To simply keep on asking questions that are logically the most closely related to the latest thing you've learnt. E.g.:

  • If you've learnt a (declarative) sentence, think: "How can I negate that sentence? How can I ask a yes-no question based on it?"
  • If you've learnt to make a statement on one thing, think "What needs to be changed if it were multiple things?"
  • If you've learnt a sentence without pronouns, think "What's gonna happen if I wanted to use some pronouns in there?"

This approach - or perhaps even better called an "order" - of finding stuff to learn, is nice and pragmatic, because it focuses on "what would I not have known" about language features.

This nicely deals with the cases when you're trying to express something very similar to the example sentence you've learnt but couldn't figure out how to tweak the example into the actual thing you're wanting to use, due to not knowing what would happen when "things go wrong" aka "unexpected things happen".