Steve Kaufmann Weighs In on Passive vs. Active Vocabulary in Languages

Steve Kaufmann, whose LingQ website I use as a subscribing member, speaks some twenty languages to varying degrees and has his own ideas about how to learn languages.  He strongly emphasizes the building of a large passive (listening and reading) vocabulary as the foundation upon which a smaller subset of active vocabulary (speaking and writing) can grow.  His philosophy is that communication is the main function of language and that making mistakes (and learning from them) is a necessary element of the learning process.  I understand his take, for during my own limited excursions in trying to converse with native speakers in their own languages, I would usually start it out by saying something simple I just learned.  Then, the other speaker would come back at me with words I've never learned...of course, since I was going at it without first developing a substantive passive vocabulary to draw upon.  Some of these language learning businesses get on TV and show somebody going to a foreign country ordering food or giving the taxi driver their destination with flawless pronunciation...as if that somehow proves they can now fluently speak their target language.  I've been using Steve's LingQ and am very satisfied with it and hopeful that my progress will lead, in a reasonable period of time, to passive near-fluency in the languages I'm studying.  He also has his own self-titled YouTube channel...check it out and see if he doesn't make a lot of sense...