I am from Spain. I started to learn English when I was 17.I had always study French and there was no much future in it, so I decided to learn English.
I attended English lessons for a feu years. At the begining I was happy, I leant very quicly, but after some years I realized that I could control grammar but I couldn't say a word spontaneously.
So, I decided to travel to England in summer. This was the first time I was had to "produce" my speech if I wanted to go to the toilets, to have lunch, to have my hair cut,... After a month in Bournemouth, I came back to my city, Barcelona, with the certainty that I had learnt much more in a month in England than in several years in a school of English in Barcelona.
So, from that moment, I have been going out to England or abroad every summer and I think this is the only way to start speaking English. You get self-confidence when speaking, even if you commit some mistake, and little by little, the fluency comes to you. And then you have what you wished: use English to communicate.
That is the aim, not so much the excellence of the English you use.