Silent Period works when you have a good foundation in how many hours of listening and how many words you can recognize when reading. If your current strategy is focusing on known words, your potential is higher to do listening and speaking but you won’t make actual progress until you do the listening to further benefit the known words. Based on your description here is that you want to have conversations asap. Get the listening in and shoot for a good number of listening hours too to get maximum pleasure when you start to speak along side with the known words.
Source: I started speaking at 49,000 words.
My Lingq journey through silent period: Tried Speaking/Italki For the first time after 1.5 years of Massive Input / Chinese Milestone / Appreciation Post