Learn from everyone around you and make sure you can successfuly communicate all you want to say to another person.
Secondly, be more communicative. Share every single point of your project to all your colleagues, bosses and friends. If they are involved in it, they will get clearer understanding of the overall situation and make less biased judgement; if they are not, they usually will give you suggestion for the difficulties you've got. Use all kind of tools to communicate: word of mouth, email, IM, gossip, meetings, minutes, documents...... Communicate more and you will have less problem.
Say if you meet any difficulties that hinders you from deliver certain product, quickly inform your boss and all relevant parties once you realize it, usally in the form of a email with proper English, clearly explain the difficulties you are facing, the potential impact on your progress and propose any work arounds or suggested solutions.
In real life, usually there will be hand over documents for project/program handover. If your colleague does not provide you such thing or the documents are not well prepared, highlight it to your boss and all relevant parties immediately. Stating that you can't takeover from him without proper documents and you suggest your colleague complete or improve his document before doing any handover, and the unfamilarity may cause delay or even failure of the project(if the document is not prepared/improved.) If you are really new and inexperienced, you can even call for a handover meeting or training. Then you can prepare everything that you feel you need support and discuss it during the meeting.
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