You learn a language when you start speaking it badly in public. Before that, you’re just memorizing.

Recognition and production are different skills, and studying only builds the first one. You can know a thousand words and still freeze at a counter, because the part that assembles a sentence under time pressure has never actually been used. Sounding bad in front of a real person is the only exercise that trains it.

Find low stakes reps. Order in the language, talk to a relative for five minutes, join whatever conversation group exists near you. Expect to be worse out loud than you are on paper for a while. That gap is the thing closing.