Hi everyone!

I've been moving through the Basic courses here at Lernu and believe I'm ready to move onto the intermediate, but I've noticed a few things recently that I just wanted to get some opinion about:

A lot of people suggest immersing yourself in the target language. So I've done as much as I can to immerse myself in Esperanto.. Firefox is in eo, minecraft is in eo, and I've even gone to eo.wikipedia and just clicked on the random article to do some light reading. One thing I've noticed is my high level of comprehension vs. my level of speaking. I can read most (not too technical or obscure) things in Esperanto, and understand the majority of what is being said (meaning, I can do more than merely paraphrase what is being said, I can translate most sentences). However, most of this is from a combination of how the grammar works and knowing enough French and other languages to usually guess what the root means without much issue. But I think I've sort of fallen into a sort of trap, because when I go to speak, I can almost never find any words that I know I could recognize.

For example, the other day I clicked on random article and landed on a page about Mutaj Cignoj, and comprehended it pretty well, but I couldn't read the page, then shut my laptop and recite, or even paraphrase what I read in Esperanto.

Would you all have any suggestions to overcome this? Should I just write down root words and begin to memorize them?

Thanks so much!

EDIT: I've also been meaning to ask this, which is completely off tope, but I've been registered here for a few good years (since 2008 I believe)... and I had a few hundred posts, now it shows I have 5.. not that it makes that much of a difference, I'm just curious if anyone knew why.

Smartyy: because when I go to speak, I can almost never find any words that I know I could recognize

Have you tried the 'Tujmesaĝilo'? You have to respond in real-time, and after awhile you may find the words just occur to you as you think of the meaning you want to convey.

Sentence construction is hard in ANY foreign language. Unravelling the sentences built by someone else is a different sort of thing. Copying patterns of usage is good in the beginning and this acts like a sort of scaffold until you start to be more free-form and creative in your use, adding words.

You might try pulling down some of the podcasts out on the net and first follow along with them, and second see if you can summarize in Esperanto what you heard. Some media clients like VLC will let you change the speed on an MP3 file so you can slow the audio down if you need to without having it sound like it was recorded by Andre the Giant. It's not quite as good as conversing with a live human being, but it's better than nothing.

Rheotaxis' suggestion about the Tujmesaĝilo is a good one too. Again, it doesn't get you talking, but it gets you thinking in real time.