nguage” you speak after two months. After a couple of years, the language you speak may be enough like that of native speakers that you can justifiably call it Chukchee. However the “language” you spoke after two months, and the one you spoke after six months, were quite different from Chukchee in the strictest sense. What were those “languages”? Chukchee speakers could understand you when you spoke to them, and you could understand a lot of what they said when they spoke Chukchee. What you spoke was a real language (despite all of my scare quotes). More precisely, it was a series of languages, each one more like real Chukchee than the last. You invented these languages as you went along, on the basis of the Chukchee you heard. I have to say you invented these languages, because they were unique to you. You didn't hear anyone else talking like that, so you can't really say that you learned them. No. You invented them, using as your source of building blocks all of the comprehensible input you were exposed to.
You may prefer to think that you didn't invent anything. Rather, you may say, you only learned something. You learned Chukchee, only you learned it poorly at first. But if we may return to the example of someone learning English we'll see that there is quite a bit of inventing going on. Wode (1981) examined the forms of negative sentences used by people learning English. Learners first learned to use the word “no” in response to questions or statements. Then they started adding it to sentences, so that if they wished to say that someone had not finished doing something, they might say “No finish.” Later they would use the word “no” in slightly fuller sentences, as in “That's no good”, meaning what you would mean by “That's not good.” Later they would learn to add a form of the helping verb “do”, and say something like “You didn't can throw it” (all of these examples are cited in Cook, 1991, p. 19 ). I think it is fair to say that sentences like “No finish,” and “You didn't can throw it,” come from an invented language. They are not simply copied from normal English. Rather the speakers know bits of English, and use those bits to invent their own language. These invented languages that are derived from the language being learned, and which gradually become more and more similar to the language being learned, have been called interlanguage (see especially Selinker, 1992).
The existence of interlanguages is one of the main reasons we know that brains know how to learn languages. The interlanguages of people learning a given language, let's say, learning English, go through similar stages, regardless of their mother tongue. For example most people go through this same sequence of patterns in learning to form negative sentences in English. Why do different people's interlanguages go through the same stages while learning English negation? The answer is that when it comes to learning a language, your brain has a mind of its own. It will invent the interlanguages, and refine them, until it has succeeded in reinventing the language as it is spoken by natives, or at least some reasonable facsimile.
I say all of this to reassure you that if you keep exposing yourself to comprehensible input, and keep persisting in conversational practice, your speech will keep getting better. Some perfectionistic people don't like this. They would prefer to speak perfectly, or not at all. Well, if you are such a person, swallow your pride. Speak badly. The way to come to be able to speak well is to speak badly for an extended period of time.
So then, speaking the language imperfectly is essential. There is a whole body of research on how people manage to cope while they are still not very good at using their new language. They use a variety of strategies in order to communicate, strategies which have been labeled, appropriately enough, communication strategies.
There have been a number of efforts made at classifying the strategies people use when communicating in a second language (these are surveyed in Bialystok, 1990 ). One well-known syste