Advice for a Novice Interested in Speaking Japanese

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It sounds like you're on the right track and have made great progress! To learn kana, I at first used this app called "TinyCards" by Duolingo. Unfortunately, it does not exist anymore, but Duolingo proper wasn't horrible for teaching scripts and basic words.

I don't mean to disappoint you but I think I would like you caution you to calibrate your expectations with your goals. If you want to prioritize speaking, you should probably try to listen and speak as much as possible. Mostly listening, as you can't speak if you can't understand what people say to you (saying something and then not understanding what is said to me in reply is still something that really frightens me), and also listening that is scoped to your skill level unless you are able to sit down at a podcast with a transcript or CC and a dictionary and force yourself to understand every sentence as you listen, then re-listen, etc. Very painful stuff.

I still have a lot to learn but I can play games, read newspapers, and trudge through novels in Japanese. I usually have a lot of new flash cards to make after covering new content but I can at least get by if I don't have a dictionary on hand.

I am absymally horrible at speaking. Perhaps I am judging myself too harshly, as when I was in Japan I was able to hang out with my Japanese friend for three days, but I'm definitely not a cool kid knowing all the slang.

I tend to think that reading is a lot more important when learning Japanese, even if it's technically not necessary from a true "immersion" level (since antiquity people always knew how to speak before they became literate). Reading allows you to take the time to understand grammar, develop vocabulary, and in my opinion, learn to make fewer mistakes. That being said, you may be surprised how little reading ability will carry over to speaking unless you really, really, get comfortable. You need to allow yourself to get comfortable and be fine with making mistakes in order to learn, but if you don't have people who point out those mistakes, then you might also re-enforce intelligible but unnatural or incorrect speaking patterns.

Maybe I can partition the advice as sort of a choice, or perhaps two different tracks that can be pursued simultaneously:

1. If you want to prioritize speaking, you should try to find a native speaking partner as soon as possible. (I didn't have a single Japanese friend for years and currently the only ones I have are all in Japan on a different time zone so I recognize this may seem really hard). Ideally, this should be a fixed person (not a stream of random people) who is / are not uncomfortable correcting your mistakes, as many Japanese people are polite and can be hesistant to correct mistakes even when asked. It is much less awkward-in person than on video calls, in my opinion, but you can do whatever is best for you. A lot of places don't have Japanese language exchanges, and at my local one the Japanese-English native ratio is usually about 20-80 at a minimum so imo it's hardly worth going (I'm just not very sociable). At this stage, you will probably find people who are learning English and who are better at English than you are Japanese so it may be really easy and tempting to switch to English a lot, and the other person may want to in order to improve their English. imo, this is okay, you don't need "true immersion" and someone who you can ask grammar questions about in English is valuable too, but just make sure you're talking in Japanese as much as conveniently possible and that the other person isn't abusing you by only talking in English.
2. I am a fan of the "read what you want to read and look up words with yomitan & make cards" type of method. However, a downside, of course, is that when you really start, a lot of things are really difficult and you might find children's books boring. You may consider playing Nintendo games in Japanese. They aren't all necessarily easy and can have things like Kansai dialect and creative writing for place names and such you won't hear spoken, but the benefit is that you can stop and translate each line, and they are games, so if you like games... yeah.
   1. Anyway, the main point I wanted to get across is to become comfortable with Bunpro. Bunpro is a SRS (spaced repetition system) tool for learning grammar. You can pay for a subscription if you want, it never really stuck with me (yet?), but it has very valueable descriptions of grammar patterns in English, some in Japanese too, all available for free. For each grammar point, it references the page that it is discussed in various textbooks, and it often links to other resources you can read about the grammar point too on the web for free. In Japanese, once you get past the basic particles, a lot of grammar points are constructed with combinations of those particles and common words, so you may sometimes be unsure whether something is classified as a proper "grammar point" by a textbook or you just don't understand it (because you don't know of an alternate meaning of a word in the sentence or something). If you think something is maybe a grammar point, you can wrap it in quotes and search it with "bunpro" in your search engine, and I also think that typing in sentences to ChatGPT or taking photos of games (or anything, I guess) and asking an LLM AI tool what it means and to break down the grammar is also valid, though be sure to not follow everything blindly.

I suppose I broke this down into two points because I don't know what to do about listening (aside from the speaking part). Early on, you should be ingesting as much Japanese audio as possible IMO (anime, podcasts, whatever) so that the intentonations and places to pause (the things that don't really come up in written text) become more subconsciously ingrained in your mind, but, unless you stop and translate things line-by-line, you probably won't be understanding much at all, and this can often be demoralizing and drive you insane. Maybe you can listen to those beginner podcasts and vlogs on youtube or material that accompanies textbooks about how to ask for directions and stuff. I really don't know and I still suck at listening.

Anyway, this ended up being longer than I thought it would be. I wanted to simply caution you to not have too high expectations, but tamper that blow by acknowledging the great progress you have made and also giving what I think is tangible advice. I simply think that it is going to be a lot harder than you might think right now to have even simple spoken conversations in Japanese, even a year from now, but, perhaps, instead of demoralizing you, you could take it as a challenge to try to prove me wrong haha.