How to overcome the fear of speaking?

In my life I have learned French, Russian and Latin. I have learned and I’m still learning English. Perpetually, I had the same problem as, I suppose, any person attempting to learn foreign languages: my knowledge was mostly passive, I knew a lot of words and grammatical rules but as soon as I had to say something, my problems started.

How did I overcome this fear of speaking?

Back in the day, before saying something in English, I put together the sentence in my head. Creating a correct sentence required a lot of time, so I took breaks when speaking, which slowed down the conversation and irritated whoever I was talking to! Once I noticed that, I decided to concentrate more on fluency rather than perfection. I hit the jackpot! I forgot about the grammar and focused on what I wanted to communicate. Believe me, people would much rather hear phonetic and grammatical mistakes than breaks in your sentences and “eeeer” inserted after every third word. Your speech will become correct with time. First, start speaking, then make what you say better: grammatically, phonetically, syntactically etc. Start by focusing on communicating what you want to communicate! If, for example, the people you’re speaking to answered your question in a way which shows without a doubt that they understood you, you have achieved success! Perfection will come along with time :)

Imagine that in order to say one Polish sentence in a way that is absolutely correct, you have to repeat it 5 times and on the sixth it will finally be 100% accurate. The sooner you complete those five incorrect sentences, the better.  No one else can make these mistakes for you. You have to make them yourselves, to finally remember the correct form!

Good luck!