I’m somewhere in season 5 now, and starting to speak to people has been a real rush and really helped keep me motivated and show you in real life scenarios what you need to work on.

My experience/ recommendations:
I travel a lot, often in countries where I don’t speak the language, so I usually try to find a japanese restaurant with japanese speaking waiters/ waitresses and fire up some japanese (possible in almost every city I’ve been to- in germany, south america, montreal, US, spain, etc etc). This was intimidating for me at first, so before that I actually started by trying to find skype partners through lang-8 (usually people that gave good corrections and had slightly better english than my japanese so we would be able to understand each other at least a little if the going got rough). Also intimidating, but basically you just find someone’s skype on their profile, they put it on there for a reason, or post something like “I want to skype!” and if someone sends you their info call them up! It turns out everyone is on there for the same reason, and most people are shy, like everyone, so most people are really glad you took the scary first step of calling a stranger. I also have found language schools that have free ‘meet up and speak japanese days’ (usually with japanese people living in the country to learning english), and Japanese meet-ups in bars and restaurants in plenty of cities. I’m still a beginner, but the point for me is to learn to speak to people so you really have to put yourself out there to make this happen, and it’s the only way it will improve. I have so many times when people use words I ‘know’ from flashcards, but I don’t catch it at first in the conversation. Gotta just keep trying I guess! Ganbatte! Good luck!