Input = understanding

Antimoon has an extremely important article on why input has to come before output in language learning. Read it - I promise it will revolutionize your perceptions of language learning. It has also served to reinforce my belief that fill-in-the-blank worksheets are a terrible way to learn good French. Pressuring yourself to construct sentences and say phrases in your new language will encourage bad habits if you don't have enough input first. You can't actually learn anything by creating your own sentences, because there is zero new linguistic material entering your brain. You're just rearranging what you already know, and there's a good chance you're rearranging some of it wrong. Thus, it's important to listen to how native speakers talk - a LOT - before you try to say anything yourself. The same goes for writing.

If you listen enough, words and phrases will start to make sense on their own. I first experienced this phenomenon while watching anime. Often when a character said "I understand," "Yes," or "I get it," they would say "wakata" or "wakatimashita," or another phrase along those lines. Though I don't know the verb stem of whatever this word is, when I hear variations of this word I understand its core meaning. The same goes for grammar patterns. In one anime, one character said "Shinjiteiru" ("I will always believe in you"), and another said "Mateiru" ("I'll be waiting"). It wasn't hard to understand intuitively that the Japanese "teiru" ending implies ongoing activity or an ongoing state. It was a lot easier to pick this up from anime than a textbook - and I don't think I'll ever forget it, even if I never glance at Japanese again.

Remember that your brain was deliberately designed to make sense of language. The more you listen, the more patterns you'll pick up, and the more it'll make sense.