David Sedaris has written a lot of funny stuff about second-language-learning. Here’s this about avoidance:
Living in France, he avoids natives whenever he can, since his linguistic inadequacies come into full bloom during live conversation. But if he were in prison, he postulates, then he’d have nowhere to hide. He imagines asking a fellow prisoner (during crafts class), “Tell me, Jean Claude, do you like the glaze I’ve applied to my shapely jug?”
“Of the above, I can say, ‘Tell me, Jean Claude, do you like the … jug?’
“Glaze is one of those words that shouldn’t be too difficult to learn, and the same goes for shapely. I’m pretty good when it comes to retaining nouns and adjectives, but the bit about applying glaze to the shapely jug — that’s where I tend to stumble. In English, it’s easy enough — ‘I put this on that’ — but in French, such things have a way of biting you in the ass. I might have to say, ‘Do you like the glaze the shapely jug accepted from me?’ or ‘Do you like the shapely jug in the glaze of which I earlier applied?’
“For safety’s sake, perhaps I’d be better off breaking the one sentence into three:
‘Look at the shapely jug.’
‘Do you like the glaze?’
‘I did that.’“If I spent as much time speaking to my neighbors as I do practicing imaginary conversations in the prison crafts center, I’d be fluent by now…”
Sedaris, David (2008). The Man in the Hut. When You Are Engulfed in Flames. New York: Little, Brown and Company (186–187).