Learn English before speaking English

Here is the podcast

You need to learn English before you start to speak in English! I have been working on my Russian over the holidays. I am fighting my way through Bulgakov's "The Life of Monsieur de Moliere" reading, listening and saving words and phrases using the Beta version of The Linguist. There are a lot of new words. Many of them are identified by The Linguist system as low frequency words but I am still trying to learn them. At the same time I am reviewing older, easy content, listening to it, and repeating phrases while I listen. I still do not speak Russian with anyone and have no real desire to do so. I guess I would summarize my philosophy as follows; until I can read and listen to a novel, news programs and recorded conversations in Russian and enjoy doing so, I have no desire to speak with anyone. I might be extreme but I feel there is so much I can on my own to improve in the language, I am not sure that stumbling around in a conversation at this stage in my learning would really help me. I think the same is true for English learning. Maybe I am being unfair. It is true that I do not need to learn Russian, nor to speak it. As learners of English you may have a greater need to produce language output at an earlier stage. You should still spend most of your time on reading, listening, word and phrase review, and imitating and repeating phrases; in other words activities that you can control. You need to do two things; become more in tune with the language, and learn words and phrases. This comes from input activities. When you can enjoy listening to and reading novels and news report, the speaking will come naturally.

I look forward to hearing your views!