I understand podcasts fine but freeze completely when someone speaks to me Speaking

You have trained recognition and never trained retrieval. They are different skills and podcasts only build the first one. The fix that worked for me was stupidly simple: talk out loud to myself for 10 minutes a day, unscripted, about what I did that morning. No audience, no correction, no phone. Two weeks of that and the freeze stopped being a freeze and became a stumble. Then I added a weekly tutor and the stumble shrank.

The freeze is a timing problem, not a knowledge problem. Real conversation gives you about 700 milliseconds before silence gets awkward. A podcast gives you infinity. Practise under time pressure specifically — set a timer for 60 seconds and answer a random question before it runs out. It feels ridiculous and it works.

Get a set of filler phrases and drill them until they are automatic. alors, en fait, attends, comment dire — they buy you two seconds and, more importantly, they stop the silence that triggers the panic. Natives use them constantly. I used to think they were sloppy. They are load bearing.

Small thing nobody mentions: your listening is probably worse than you think in the real world. Podcast audio is compressed, mastered and spoken clearly into a microphone. A person in a shop is half turned away, swallowing words, with an espresso machine running behind them. Some of the freeze is that you genuinely did not catch it and your brain stalls checking.

Honestly at 14 months you just need more input. Another 500 hours of podcasts and the speaking sorts itself out.