Asklemmy

Sounds like you just need to practice. Maybe find a friend who can video call you a few times a week just to chat until you're feeling confident?

Do you watch tv or movies in English? Hearing general dialogue like that may help with your conversation/responses.

Looking at your responses it seems that you have a good grasp on the english language. Which is good! It means you have all the tools available to you when making conversation. You probably just need more practice. Conversations in non-native languages can be difficult, because you have to come up with an answer on the spot. It's not impossible, though. You'll probably stumble for words and make mistakes at first, but that's perfectly normal and okay.

tl;dr: talk more. Good luck!

1. Read books
2. Read books
3. Read books

As had been said - practice. It's how native speakers of a language get good at it.

You can improve your vocabulary, comprehension and accent by watching TV shows and movies (I remember meeting Dutch kids on holiday who I thought were American as they learn so much from the screen),, and grammar and the like can come from reading. However, that ease of conversation and the speed of your recall of words just comes from talking a lot. Try finding an intermediate to advanced language class where they insist on people talking in that language all the time.

If you're the kind of person to think in words, try to practice thinking in English.

check open discord communities for practicing languages. i know they are out there.

Alternatively, look for english speaking discord communities that you identify with or share interests.

If you're interested in videogames at all, playing some multiplayer games could help. TV/books are great too, but I think chatting online would give you a realistic dialogue to learn from, and having a common goal with the other players should give you plenty of opportunities to contribute to the dialogue.

And as a bonus, you'll probably learn lots of creative insults haha

Put yourself in positions in which you have to speak English a lot. Do you live in an English speaking country? If so, then go to social events. No? Go to events in which speaking English is the point (like language cafes, etc.)

And please use capitalization when writing :)

A friend of mine who was learning English said that translating song lyrics from her native language into English really helped, 'cause you have to kind of get the meaning across and not just a literal translation of the words. Dunno if it works for everyone but she swore by it!

I learnt english by reading books. That might help, although reading can be quite a passive activity, so you might want to couple it with some writing activities to make sure you're actually doing something so it sticks better. I'm also not sure how well that will work for your specific problem of struggling with conversations, but tbh I'm not great at speaking to people irl myself (although that applies in my first two languages—english is my third—as well so I don't think it's a language barrier thing so much as my brain thing) so I dunno what would help with that specifically.

When learning another language, it's really normal for your comprehension to be way better than your production. Input > output. Just keep talking to people and consuming English media and it will come to you. The more you increase your input, the more fluently and naturally you'll speak -- it won't sound like you're speaking from a textbook.

Like you I also struggle with vocab though. What I like to do for focused study is watch a show or some piece of media and pick out some words I want to learn in context and make flashcards from them.

My Spanish and especially my French are like 1000% better if I have had a little alcohol to drink. It’s not an awesome tool and I don’t use it anymore, but it definitely helps build confidence that I kept after drinking.

Eh. This is stupid don’t do this.

Read as much good, entertaining, engrossing, addictive fiction as you can.

For example if you like sci-fi, read The Expanse series. It’s 9 books. Thousands and thousands of pages, and it’s all entertaining.

Doing this will make you better at composing sentences of all types, short, long, simple, complex, future tense, past tense, complex construction, you’ll encounter hundreds of examples of each when you read a novel.

As most others already said, the best solution is immersion, ideally by talking with someone. If you can't find someone to speak with that would make it quite a bit harder to improve, but not impossible.

For your situation (being able to understand but unable to express yourself in English) I'd reccommend the stereotypical "think in english". I'd recommend talking with someone (ideally a native speaker, but even a fellow learner is incredibly efficient, followed by writing a diary abd participating in online forums (like you currently already are!).

It's best to have input from someone else who can correct you if you make a grammatical mistake, give general advice on what sounds 'more natural' or 'better' in the language and answer any questions you might have, as well as help you if you're "missing one word" (from personal experience when learning a language it's rarely a 'it's at the tip of my tongue' situation. It's more like I just don't know this one word and I need someone to give it to me).

Another thing I can say about your problem is I also suffer a bit from it. Whenever I try to talk in German I need a few hours to 'warm up' - to just get my brain to switch to German and having a speaker on the other side really helps. I can hear the language to jog my memory and the other side can (and often does) give me input on what they think I might be trying to say. (I'm a B1-level speaker so not even close to fluent but more than enough for doing basic interations within an environment open to helping with language issues).

What I liked to do when I was actively learning German was trying to come up with different ways of saying 'the same thing', seing how they differ in their meaning, potential usecases, complexity, grammar, etc. It helps with vocabulary as well as the "thinking in German" part, as languages differ greatly in the ways they package the same message and taking a comparative approach helps greatly with being able to (casually) converse later. Having a fellow learner or a fluent speaker give you multiple variations of the same thing and analyze the differences for/with you would be a godsend for this approach.

I may not have a big tip, but here's what I've done when learning other languages...

I listen to people speaking and try to repeat it to myself. If I can hear it in my head, it will sound normal. So when I need to, I can remember how it sounded in my head, and decide if it will sound good in the Curr context.

I am in a similar situation here. If you ask me, if your communication follows all the hard rules such as the wording order follows consistency and if what you say adds up, that's what matters. Other than that, just try to improve as you go along. Talking to an AI (or me) might help.

Some people seem to be blessed with the ability to naturally speak a language based on input practice alone, but I think that most people need to practice input (listening, reading) and output (speaking, writing) separately. The thing that helped me the most (at least for French) was starting a journal in my target language and adding to it every day, but anything probably works as long as it gets you writing or speaking.

Have you read proper English literature?

One thing to keep in mind, just to get your expectations right. Kids are more neuroplastic than us, and it takes kids about 5 years of practicing every day to get fluent at their first language. They are learning a few more things for the first time during that too. But you can expect it to take about as many practice hours. So if you only practice 1 hour a week, it's gonna be a long time. But also, you don't need to hit the bar of "fluent" to solve your problem. Where kids are at after 1 year is very serviceable for it instead being a second language. If you plan to move to an english speaking country, that would be plenty to get by in your day to day life while you all of a sudden start also spending every day practicing.

Learning to read and interpret a new language is more than 10 times easier than learning to speak it. Even just writing in it, where you have all the time in the world to compose each sentence is going to take alot of practice to get good at. For speaking, you have to be quick enough to form full sentences in seconds, at a time where it's not the main thought process going on in your head.

As someone who has studied and speaks multiple languages, the only way to get better at speaking is to do it. For sentence formation and such, talking to yourself or narrating your day can help. For conversations, you basically need conversations.

This advice is also true for reading; to get better at reading, read me (which I think applies most if your native and target languages use different writing systems. I can read and pronounce Finnish, for instance, but won't know what more than two or three words mean. I find it far more difficult reading Japanese even though I speak it well enough to do basically anything I need to in the language).

You need to find people at your level or a bit highter or using chatgpt with voice