But you need to practice speaking to be able to speak! You should speak as soon as you can.

There’s plenty of evidence that output arises spontaneously from input, and that there’s no need to practice output early on, or to practice a lot. There have been many cases of children that remained silent for years, and when they started speaking they could already put sentences together as well as any other child their age. There are also examples of adults that hadn’t been able to communicate for their whole lives because of a handicap, and once a technology became available to help them overcome that, they were as proficient as any other adult. Based on the research of the last few decades and on our own experience, this also holds true for adults learning a foreign language. Traditional language education often works on the assumption that vocabulary needs to be “activated”. This theory suggests that the mental effort of searching for words in our head somehow “activates” them and moves them from our passive vocabulary to our active vocabulary. But that can’t be necessary. Think about the following words: Cleopatra, horseshoe, shrine, blacksmith, Neptune, malaria. What do they have in common? They are words that are quite infrequent, and most native speakers likely never had to say out loud a few of them. Yet, most native speakers wouldn't have any problem producing them fluently during a conversation. If you think about it, you'll probably realize that you routinely say words in your first language for the first time in your life without needing to "activate" them. And in our personal experience, we also do it a lot in languages that we’ve learned later in life. Many language learners have had the experience of having said a word that came out of their mouth spontaneously, without ever having said it before. Sometimes even without being aware that they knew the word. We explain this in more detail in the blog post How to play a foreign language. Some people believe that we need to start speaking early so that we learn from the corrections we receive. But corrections are not good feedback for learning a language, and the research shows that they don’t work. For more on this, check the answer for How will I know I'm saying it right if nobody corrects me?. Besides speaking not resulting in acquisition, starting to speak too early on can actually be quite detrimental, as we explain in Why do you not recommend practicing speaking?. The conclusion is that even if your final goal is speaking, you learn speaking best by first listening a lot.