If it is any consolation, I believe my Known word count in Korean is over 20,000 and I still have great difficulty in my listening comprehension. It also took me a long time to get to where I could fully understand interviews at Echo. Czech also took quite a long time, but then Ukrainian and Polish went quite quickly. I think one just has to put one’s head down and persevere, making sure we do things that we enjoy doing, whether it be listening to interesting content or the opportunity to speak to people.
On the subject of the long road to comprehension after the initial period of success in making some sense of a new language, check out my latest blog post.The Two Stages of Language Learning: The Upside Down Hockey Stick
Of course having to communicate to your Russian wife’s mother is also a great strategy for learning Russian. I am engaged to a Russian woman at the moment, so I will be getting plenty of such practice before long. I better achieve that goal of 20,000 known words soon!
How to speak then? If I don’t force me to speak I don’t practice. If I don’t practice I don’t improve my speak abilities. My writing abilities are not good. But if I don’t write I don’t improve my writing abilities. A friend or a wife from our target language also is an opportunity.
Simple, continue your input activities and speak when you feel like it without forcing yourself.
Simple for you and relatively simple for me, not that simple for many people even if they do desire to talk or have speaking practice. They have all kinds of fear, worrying about their accent, etc.
My belief is that if I haven’t heard it, I won’t try to say it (well, with exception to words that are spelled similarly to others), because I feel speaking something I don’t have any idea what it means is forcing too much.
Basically the trickle down effect for me starts at reading and goes to listening and eventually speaking.
Which reminds me, I’ve listened to Evgueny’s lessons a few times, and I think it’s time for me to read it out loud.
As for the anxiety that all of us feel about speaking in a foreign language especially at the beginning, some more some less, in my view the more comfortable we are the better we will do. The better we understand, the better we can hear how the words are pronounced, the more used to the language we are, the bigger our vocabulary, the less anxiety we will feel. So to me, forcing yourself to speak before you feel ready is not a formula for overcoming anxiety. Speaking when you want to is.
I am not anxious about speaking or even about making the inevitable mistakes in case endings. I get anxious when i hear my mother-in-law reply with a barrage of Russian that I don’t understand! My wife has to tell her to say a few words slowly and not to use slang!
Colin, you know how to say я люблю тебя , don’t you? You don’t need 20,000 words for that!
The golden words!
Well, I do also want to memorise a few love poems in Russian. My biggest worry is that I will have to learn Russian cursive if I want to write her love letters!
Yep, this is my main worry. I find speaking makes me feel uncomfortable because I am simply terrible at it, but I know I could learn quite quickly if I really tried to speak well enough that I don’t feel shy or uncomfortable. The problem is I don’t understand much of anything people say, and this is not solved by people speaking slowly and clearly since even when they do, I don’t know the meanings of the words they are using (or at least, not enough of them).
My girlfriend speaks Russian, and so from day one I started speaking. She always laughs at my pronunciations but corrects them best she can. I think for this reason I’ve never had a psychological fear of speaking. In my opinion if you leave these things too long the fear will get worse and you may put it off for a long time. I also use the app HelloTalk to find people who want to learn English, and for me to practice Russian.
My girlfriends mother and family used to speak Russian around me a lot before I got better at listening. When i got at a semi conversational level, they decided to switch over to Ukrainian to have more private discussions 
They must be fun at parties…
Time to learn Ukrainian
Don’t worry about that if YOU want to write. I prefer to write the characters the same shape as we can see them in the books. I don’t like to decode the hand-writing style shown above, that’s why I write the way everybody can read it.
Then they will switch to Belarusian!
To be honest, the only reason I rarely try to practice Russian with my Russian girlfriend is that I can’t be bothered and we already switch between English and German every couple of days. At the moment, I am comfortable just improving my comprehension and passive vocabulary on LingQ and doing some lessons on Skype with a teacher. I have decided that when I get to about 20,000 known words on LingQ, I will stop using my laziness as an excuse and start making more effort to produce Russian. I will probably start conversastion lessons with LingQ tutors at that time.