How to cross the basic vocabulary threshold?
I am a native speaker of Serbo-Croatian (Montenegrin specifically) and have been somewhat exposed to Russian through games such as STALKER, METRO and CSGO. And even though I understand mostly whenever I am conversing with other Russians I get mad that my vocabulary is the bare minimum, literally below the A2 level. At first I had though that similar and shared vocabulary will make it easier, but I soon realized that it was just either situation-specific vocabulary or totally useless words/phrases (those I learnt in aforementioned games).
I stumbled upon Olly Richard's book entitled "Short Stories in Russian" and gave it a try. It has everything one serious learner of Russian language needs; marked stress on each syllable for each word, there's a glossary at the end of each chapter, but I still wasn't fond of it. Most of the words I knew and those I didn't, I quickly found some same root across other Slavic languages and memorized them fairly easily. Then I tried joining a Discord server and once I started speaking I was fumbling and couldn't find proper words to say at the right time. I would either completely forget the word I was about to say or I'd just try to "borrow" some from my native tongue in hope the other person would understand me either through context or that word would be exactly the same in both languages, but mostly it wasn't the case. I had to refer to Yandex and/or Gemini to properly convey my message, but I knew I was doing something wrong.
Any advice? Thanks in advance :)