You are maybe wondering about the tutoring sessions when you are going through the 625 words and creating sentences out of them. When do you get to the rules of grammar?
We do a few different things. 100% of the time in the first two months and maybe 80% of the time afterwards, our goal is just vocabulary acquisition. We want examples of each word on our list that shows us how to use the words in a sentence. We want them to refer to experiences in our life; either things that happened to us in the past, events going on right now, plans for the future, etc.
That’s a lot of grammar, all on its own.
Once we’ve been doing this for a while, we’ll start getting a better feel for how the grammatical system works overall, and where we're missing pieces. For example, we’ll realize that we're pretty proficient at conjugating verbs in the past tense, as long as they’re about "ME", but not if they’re about “You” or “They,” since our examples are all personal. We might come into a tutoring session then, with the express goal of trying to make some sentences with new vocabulary that also incorporates “You/They” conjugations in them. That will slow down our sentence production, but fill in some key holes in our knowledge of grammar.
One of our team members came into a tutoring session once, with the express goal of trying to come up with examples of the subjunctive in Spanish. He brought a list of verbs that trigger the subjunctive (I hope that X, I wonder if X, I suppose that X, etc.), and his tutor and he did their usual thing with new vocabulary, but tried to make their sentences fit the subjunctive as well. You’ll probably need to do that or something similar a few more times just to get the various subjunctive tenses done.
Gabe wrote a more in-depth look into this phenomena, and we think it would be a good read to see some interesting ideas on the subject:
https://blog.fluent-forever.com/hacking-fluent-forever/
