Starting Output

Hi all,

I’m at 840 hours. I have spent probably 10-15 minutes per week over the course of a couple months practicing output with ChatGPT first so that I could have time to think and not have to deal with the social pressure of talking with another human. Had my first online conversation with another human earlier this week (yay!). It was obviously super clunky but it honestly wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. And as I’ve seen many others saying on this sub, it did a good job of exposing gaps.

But now I’m curious. For those of who have already started speaking, at what hour total did you start? How frequent were your conversations/lessons? What was your speaking level when you started and how did it progress? I want to keep speaking but I want to find a balance between practicing output but not practicing it so much that I’m creating bad habits.