Learning a language means sounding clumsy out loud for a while. There’s no quiet way to get fluent.

Speaking is a physical skill as much as a mental one, and your mouth learns by making the wrong sounds in front of people. Silent study builds a store of words you cannot reach at speed, which is why a year of apps can leave you frozen in a real conversation. The awkward phase is not a detour around fluency, it is the route. Everybody fluent went through it where others could hear.

Say something imperfect out loud to a real person this week. Order something, answer a question, read a paragraph aloud if that is the only option. Aim for frequency rather than accuracy and let the corrections come.