I have heard that Russians are typically very forgiving of foreigners who mangle their cases. It’s a different story in Germany, however. If for example somebody goes there saying “der” all of the time with no respect for gender or case, most people will just switch to English…
In fairness to the original author, Campayo, he suggested using verbs without conjugation only as a beginner strategy.
He called it ‘speaking like Tarzan’. I see nothing wrong with it as a temporary strategy.
I think that he did not appreciate the difference between memorizing words and rules and being able to use them in a
language. Memorization is a part of language learning, but the integration of all the pieces of data can’t be hurried
I imagine all those neurons gradually making connections.
I wondered whether some of the techniques of the memory champions could be useful for language learning. With some of
these tricks anyone can learn the positions of a the cards in a pack in a few minutes or less.
@force
I traveled to Germany in the nineties quite often on business, and did business in German. Recently I don’t get to German speaking countries more than once every couple of years. I have even done radio interviews in German to promote LingQ. No one comments on my cases, and rarely do people switch to English.
My German suits my needs, which is mostly reading, listening and understanding, and speaking when necessary or when I am in the country. When I look at declension tables my eyes gloss over, but I do it from time to time in the hope that something sticks.
On the other hand I am motivated to learn more words so that I can read better. If I lived and worked in Germany, I think my cases would naturally improve. When I do German at LingQ I save phrases with the cases. If I did that more, I am sure my cases would improve. But the inaccuracy of my cases is not an impediment to my using German.
You can judge my German from my most recent video on youtube.
Dogwoad,
I really don’t understand the desire to speak, Tarzan like, well ahead of our ability to understand, unless there is a survival necessity, as in for an immigrant.
As for memorization and mnemonics, I personally don’t consider deliberate memorization part of my learning strategy. However, I can appreciate that many people use this technique, especially for learning Chinese characters etc.
Your German is really good and you don’t make a lot of declension mistakes 
I don 't mind when someone gets the declension endings or articles wrong but find it quite irritating when someone only uses infinitives. It gives me the feeling that the person didn’t make much effort to learn the language, especially when it’s someone who has already lived here for a long time.
I wasn’t knocking your personal level in German, Steve - I was thinking about this in more general terms.
Actually I would never make any kind of negative comment about how well another learner speaks (the one sole exception to this rule being, obviously, Mr Clugston.)