Hi guys. I need help with speaking because my current speaking level is a disaster. First I'll describe where I'm at in Japanese. I finished RTK1 in 2012 and I've been studying Japanese since, albeit very sparsely. Most of my studying is listening and reading and rarely writing. I've almost never spoken before because there's no Japanese people around town. I can sort of keep up with a lot of reading, it's definitely my strongest point. I recently met this Japanese person on Skype and we've been starting to get into a routine of talking to each other. The conversations usually go like this
Him: *says something in Japanese*
Me: えっ
Him: *says it in English*
Me: ああ、はい、そっか、わかりますetc. just generally short responses
Or sometimes I can't help but to respond in English.

It's frustrating because I understand almost every word he says but not the sentences as a whole. I know I know more than this, but my mind completely blanks out and I forget mostly everything. This seems to happen a lot when Skyping. I doubt it's social anxiety or anything, I'm not nervous I just can't think of anything in the heat of the moment. My responses are very short. I'm wondering if anyone has had similar experiences, or have some tips to overcome it.

[RawToast]

As you're coming from a reading/listening background then it will take practice to get your speaking to the point where it is closer to your reading level. Since you can read, ask your friend to write what he said, instead of an English translation (unless this is a language exchange).

Likewise, you may want to memorise some simple requests for your friend to repeat what he said e.g. すみません、繰り返してお願いします, 分かりませんゆっくり話してください, 　もういちど言ってください。 I'd tend to ask for them to repeat before asking to slow/simplify the sentence down. There's a guide on iTalki with a bunch of useful phrases.

I'd recommend taking the $9 trial with Japonin to get ~3 hours of practice (solo if you're lucky).

This is just an off the bat suggestion, but maybe try shadowing? I just began recently and find it surprising how hard it can be to actually say simple sentences - which makes it good to train them I guess

same situation here...

I do not know how to get better at listening beside listening more, and more and more.. So, radio, tv (niji tv is awesome for that) most of the time.

For generating sentence, i think the best thing around is lang-8. Create an account and try to do some short post everyday, even stupid stuff such as "i have no idea what to tell today" or "gosh, it s been raining for 2 days i m depressed" "i had the biggest kebab ever yesterday" and so on...

The more you write, the easier generating sentence will be. Luckily the oral skill use the same ressources as the written one.

Well, first let me say that you're not alone, and I applaud you for asking for help. I actually have (or used to have) the opposite problem: my speaking was my strongest of the four language abilities (speaking, listening, reading, writing). That only happened because I went to Japan without knowing any Japanese and needed to put everything I learned into practice as soon as possible.

For speaking help I recommend taking classes at Japanese Online Institute (http://www.japonin.com/). The group lesson trial is $9 for 3 classes. You will have to speak in every class.

Also, students get to participate in monthly free conversation groups. I haven't done those yet, since I am mostly there for the grammar practice. But if you do participate in them I am interested to hear what you think.

Also, they have a monthly essay correction service. They assign a topic and you have a 400 character limit. I find the quality of the corrections higher than from lang-8.com. But I also recommend lang-8 for writing practice as well.

[Zgarbas]

When I first spoke Japanese out loud in May 2013, I could barely say 食べられる。Like, i literally had to pause between syllables. My grammar and vocab was a mess. This was after I'd passed the N2, was reading novels and prepping for N1.

Signed up for the above-mentioned japonin-classes, took about 30 lessons in 2 months. It was awkward at first but I loosened up really quickly. Then I got a 3-day-gig as an interpreter where I *had* to speak Japanese and lo and behold, I could hold my own (in keigo, no less). After a semester I was living in Japan, and to my surprise I was speaking alright since day 1 (めちゃくちゃbut no one cares)

Basically, don't worry. You can't speak because you've not spoken yet, but you pick it up as soon as you need it. Try to take some online lessons or skype chats or whatever puts you in contact with Japanese speakers and force yourself to stop worrying and just say what you want to say.

Rehadowing. I actually did try it occasionally, but it was a) embarassing b)made my throat hurt for some reason (reading out loud does that to me) c)not much help when you want to actually find the words you need, as the hard part is already done for you.

I'm not great, but I'm much better than I used to be. I remember when I first started speaking, my teacher had to pull things out of me in one and two-word fragments. It was almost like having teeth pulled. Now, I usually speak in complete sentences. Victory is mine!

Frequent practice is the only way to get better. Have a convo, and come in with some things you want to say. After the conversation, try and write about the things you couldn't speak well about, and post it somewhere. Lang-8 is good, or post it to Facebook, Twitter, Ameblo, wherever. (I tend to think the practice of output itself is more important than receiving a ton of corrections you won't remember anyway.)

Also, make a lot of first time acquaintances, and have the same conversations over and over again. This will help solidify some basic patterns and word choices. Read an interesting article, then try and talk about it with one of your japanese friends.

Keep doing these things as much as you can, and your speaking will improve, slowly but surely. Just remember that this is the hardest part of learning a language, and set aside your nervousness and fear and just output as much as possible. It doesn't have to be perfect; so long as you can get your meaning across somehow, you can have a good conversation.

I guess it's mostly a matter of practice. I'll look into that japonin site. Thanks for the replies! They really helped.

I've started talking to a tutor I found on italki who charges $8/hr. Here are some things I do to help make the session easier:

Plan about 3 subjects that you want to talk about with the teacher before the session. (Just in case you fly through one topic and need to move onto another one.) Tell the teacher what you want to talk about in a message ahead of time. In the hours leading up to the session, practice saying out loud sentences you anticipate you will want/need to say to yourself or your dog or whoever. That way, you can figure out how to get your message across and be less nervous. You can even jot down these as notes to use while chatting.

If you want to talk about a news article you read, send the teacher a link to it so they can quick look it over right before the Skype session. When you read the article, highlight vocab you didn't know or can't understand the meaning of and ask the teacher to explain it in Japanese.

Write a list of HELP! phrases (Ex: Can you speak more slowly? What does __ mean? Can you repeat that? Can you write that down? I'm sorry, I don't clearly understand...) While talking, you can look at the list if your mind goes blank. Do not be embarrassed to use these! A teacher doesn't expect you to have zero trouble jabbering away confidently, you are a student, after all.

As for me, talking to the teacher gets easier each time. Right now, I get nervous and forget vocab I "know" (I picked a teacher who understands English so I can ask her the Japanese equivalent word in a pinch) and conjugate verbs poorly compared to my writing level. I'm doing a 30 day challenge right now (speak Japanese for 1 hr for 30 days) and it really motivates me to not give up. (Sorry for rambling so much!)