That is one of the strategies that I used when learning to speak Mandarin in Taiwan. I heard someone refer to it as learning “sentence patterns”. Once you learned a few you could customize them by plugging other vocabulary words into them . It allowed me to walk out of the classroom and have conversations with shopkeepers and taxi drivers that same day.
I did pretty much the same thing when I lived in France for two years. Start out with grammatically correct phrases that don’t grate on the ear of a native speaker, and then modify them slightly in order to communicate your wants, needs, feelings, observations, etc.
