At some point somebody will speak to you in the language, without warning, and you'll have about a second.
It might be next week or next year. The one thing you can be confident about is that it won't happen at a time you chose.
The Moment Doesn't Wait for Readiness
This is what makes the "I'll start speaking when I'm ready" plan unworkable in practice.
The situations arrive on their own schedule. A colleague switches. Somebody at a family gathering turns to you. A stranger asks a question because you happen to be standing there. You're in a shop and it's just the two of you.
None of those check whether you've prepared enough. They happen, they last about four seconds, and then they resolve one way or the other.
What Happens With Knowledge but No Automaticity
Concretely: you know the answer and you cannot produce it in time.
You start assembling. They wait. The pause becomes noticeable. They either repeat themselves more slowly or switch to English, and the exchange completes without you having said anything.
That isn't a failure of knowledge. Everything needed was present. It was in the wrong form — retrievable rather than automatic — and the form is exactly what the situation tested.
The Predictable Part
Here's what makes this tractable rather than daunting.
The unplanned exchanges are almost entirely drawn from a small, repeating set. Greetings. Where are you from. What would you like. Do you want a bag. How many. It's a short list, and it's the same list everywhere.
You can't predict when it happens. You can predict, with considerable accuracy, what gets said.
Which Turns It Into Preparation
Make that short list automatic and the unplanned moment stops being a test you might fail. It becomes an exchange you handle, because the response was in place before the question arrived.
That's the whole preparation. It isn't fluency and it doesn't need to be.
About Outputly
Outputly's earliest songs are exactly that short list — the highest-frequency exchanges, made automatic first, so they're in place before you need them.