I have a certain psychological condition I like to call Expat’s Unease: I wish I could pass as a local, and it bothers me when I don’t.

I wish I could just blend in with the crowd and speak like the locals speak. I wish I could enter into conversation with random people on the street without immediately branding myself as a foreigner. In Germany, if I’m mistaken for a local, I’ll just nod and smile and say “ja!” when I don’t understand what they’re saying to me, rather than say “sorry, what?” and break the illusion. When I return home, I find myself talking to strangers much more often than I ever did before, mostly because I’m just soaking in the smooth joy of speaking like a local, with a local.

Among the many tricky facets to learning a language is the sheer volume of vocabulary one must ingest in order to effectively communicate. The challenge is compounded when learning more than one new language—you’ve got to learn the word for “cheese” again, and the word for “pain,” and “to swim” and “problem” and all the colors and shapes and days of the week. You’ll start to prioritize which words you’re going to need to know first (“where’s the bathroom” over “the cat is on the table,” let’s say), but filling up your mental dictionary is nearly unending work.

Stumbling over gaps in my vocabulary (as in the above comic, one of the few taken verbatim from a personal experience) is a sure sign to any native speaker that I’m a learner, and it bugs me. I study flashcards, I practice with friends, but when you run into that empty hole in your adopted dictionary it’s like running into a brick wall. Suddenly your sentence has run afoul of a linguistic black hole. You can’t retreat, you can’t skip over, you can only mentally scream as it sucks you into the misery of stammering, waving your hands in vague circles, and staring at the ceiling as you attempt to conjure the absent word from the abyss, while your conversation partner looks on in pity and/or Schadenfreude.

Luckily, there’s an out to this heinous scenario: learn your grammar!

Once you’ve mastered a language’s rules, it doesn’t matter if you’re missing a word, you can easily describe your way around it. This is what we do with our native tongues all the time—when we don’t know a word, we define or describe it. The same goes for languages you’re learning. You’ll find yourself able to saunter around that conversational black hole by simply describing what you mean, or even finding another way to phrase it. Yes, this too requires certain vocabulary, but don’t feel like you have to learn every word in that language before you can go out and speak.

If you can navigate a language’s verb tenses, word order, declensions, and prepositions without slipping up, you should pat yourself on the back: you’re basically fluent. The only things left for you to do, really, are to learn figures of speech and slang (so you don’t sound like a grammar textbook when you talk) and to fill up that vocab list. These can easily be accomplished over time, and will often come as a natural part of speaking the language with locals. Where grammar often must be studied to be fully understood, new words automatically slip into those dictionary gaps like Tetris pieces in your mind, ready for use.

So the next time you’re in conversation, struggling around a word you’ve neglected to add to your study sheet, just remember: it’s not the words that count, it’s what you’re saying! Don’t sweat the vocab, focus on the grammar, and everything will be just fine. The point is to communicate, not fool the locals into thinking you’re one of them. Nobody gives prizes for Best Fake Local Speaker anyway.

What about yourselves? Have you found any words to be particularly irritating to learn? Do you notice any helpful vocab overlap between similar languages, such as French and Italian? Do you also wish you could just blend in, or are you comfortable with your status as a dirty foreigner?