I admire your perseverance, but it sounds like you have found what works for you. And once you know grammar, vocabulary is what moves you from "intermediate" to "advanced" as far as speech is concerned.

Learning to speak a language, for me, is much much harder than learning to read it. I think it may be connected to how musical you are: I can't carry a tune at all, and while I have learned to read - at varying levels of ability, of course - in six languages, I only speak two fluently: my mother tongue English, and Hebrew, in which I was immersed from the age of nine, when my family moved from South Africa to Israel.

Here via Teddy's flist ... May I friend you? Your "A Treatise on the Blood of the Nightjar" is magnificent.