You have been keeping a list. It may not be written down, but you feel its weight: the things you would need to learn first, the gaps you would need to close, the questions you could not yet answer if asked.
You have decided, somewhere quietly, that the list must be finished before you are allowed to begin. I want to tell you that the list is a wall you built yourself, and you are standing on the wrong side of it.
You do not need to know everything before coming closer.
Knowing is downstream of nearness
Consider how anything is actually learned. Not by mastering it in the abstract and then approaching — but by approaching, and learning in the approach. The child does not understand the table before sitting at it.
The Gemara is full of students who asked small questions, plain questions, the kind that reveal how little a person knows. Their asking was not a delay before the learning. It was the learning. To imagine you must arrive fluent is to imagine yourself out of the very process that makes fluency.
What to do with the list
Keep the list, if you like. But stop treating it as a gate. Treat it instead as a map of where you are going — proof that you already sense the shape of the country, even from the border.
Then take the questions off the page and bring them to someone alive. A teacher does not need you to know things first; he needs you to come. The not-knowing is not a disqualification you must hide from him. It is the reason the relationship exists at all. Practice and ruling and the real answers to your real questions live with that teacher, not on any screen — including this one.