Is That the Same Philosophy of Understanding More Before You Start Speaking?

If you can't understand what the other person says, you can't have a conversation. The way that native speak their language is very precise in unpredictable ways. So pretty much for whatever idea you want to express, there's a specific way that Japanese people tend to express that. And if you don't know that ahead of time, then you have pretty much no shot at being able to just create that through thinking in English and using grammar rules and vocabulary to try to translate something into Japanese.