Two choices

Sadly more i listen some people speaking and less i want to listen to them. I have always had little interest in discussing about the anything too trivial as i am realising now. The difference is that I have come to a point where talking about "the weather" makes me absolutely annoyed and out of place, at least in languages I understand fluently as french, english or spanish. From there two choices unfold: Either looking for interesting and life improving (if not changing) conversations to share with fascinating people often depreciably called geeks or at best, nerds. The kind of people that you don't find at every street's corner even if by no means all geeks/nerds are fascinating I imagine. Another option would be to speak in a very basic manner to anyone with a brain and two legs (I don't actually need the legs) for the sole purpose of learning their language and getting to understand their weird and alien culture (for us). In this case you don't need noble price winners, scientists or even language teachers. A kind and curious soul willing to help is more than enough. At this stage any deep conversation or even slightly philosophical would be not only unthinkable but unwanted and counterproductive as impossible to understand. The only way to learn a language is obviously to start by the beginning and to use the "most spoken words" of this very language. a first set of around 1000 of this words are enough for simple "weather like" conversations. These are the "key" opening you the door of any language and culture. One can even do with as little as 500 words probably but they will have to keep asking the rest of the most common words along their trivial conversations and a word that you only hear and not read is harder to remember especially when you ignore how to write it. (in this case a smartphone can help). So learning about 1000 words is a very good starting point for simple daily converastions even if there will still be some blank sometimes. I will just finish by saying that one doesn't have to actually wait to know by heart 1000 or even 500 words before to start practising and speaking a few words of a language here and there. Actually a mere set of not more than a 100 words is enough to get started with ulta-simple conversations and i am not talking here about saying "yes, thank you and hello" since a conversation is obviously a set of sentences which usually include at least a subject, a verb and a complement...