I'm having trouble with retaining enough Japanese to use in conversation. I know a lot of words and am familiar with language structure, but any attempt to use what I know leaves my mind blank, any advice?
Actually I had the same problem with english a long time ago.
Holding a conversation is always harder than simply reading/writing.
So what helped me is well immersion i guess. I read lots (i mean really a lot) of books and watched english speaking youtubers. I also changed the language of all my electric devices to english.
I basically forced myself to engage in the language. Doing that over a period of time will naturally increase your fluency.
Note that this may take a lot of time. I dont remember how long it took me doing that for english, but it should be years. In fact I not only become fluent, I even started to think in english xD
I'm in the same boat as you I'm afraid. I can write sentences from scratch with what I do know but even with my substantial knowledge (which is not so substantial in the grand scheme of things, there is too much that needs learning!) I get tongue-tied very easily when actually trying to speak from scratch as opposed to reading out loud. It doesn't help that I'm having trouble with pitch tones, I can replicate them fine but that's on a word per word basis reading from the dictionary - when in a sentence it can rapidly spiral out of control especially if any pitches are set up to leak into words that already pitch up themselves, it can become too much to keep track of. I have no real way to practice this at all. That's not even mentioning how the tones can become unclear in conjugations, they seem to go for longer than expected in some.
Even if I was able to readily speak I doubt I'd be speaking with anyone at my current level of (non-)fluency, it would just be too embarrassing! Plus my mic is a potato and I don't like using my voice online in general anyway since it's too personally identifiable. Even then, the accents shift by dialect and online will naturally be a mixture of people from different places.
