About a year now. My spoken English was pretty rough back then, but I started copying the sounds I heard when other people spoke, and it seems to have helped.
Yeah, it's a lot harder to convey thoughts by speech in a foreign language, and I think it's because you have to make a conscious effort to find the right words or expressions. It's like getting data from RAM (foreign language) or from the L1 cache (native). It gets better though, with practice.
I would guess you aren't thinking in the language in question. You are translating your native language sentence into the appropriate english sentence on the fly. To use a programming analogy, it is like writing Haskell code as if it was C. Because you aren't thinking functionally, for every imperative step the C code in your head takes you have to translate it to some sort of functional analog.
You can get through it, but it is slower, and looks "funny" to a "native".
Yeah, it's a lot harder to convey thoughts by speech in a foreign language, and I think it's because you have to make a conscious effort to find the right words or expressions. It's like getting data from RAM (foreign language) or from the L1 cache (native). It gets better though, with practice.