Hello everyone! I'm looking for some advice on what to do next in my Spanish learning journey.
For context, I grew up as a "no sabo kid"--I had some family who spoke Spanish, but I didn't learn much other than basic phrases. Most of my life, I've spoken mainly English. I took some Spanish classes in high school, so while I could identify some tenses, I only know the basic conjugations (irregular verbs are a nightmare for me). I'm now an adult and have been trying to learn Spanish again.
I've been learning consistently for about 2.5 months, and so far I've only done input. I've read ten books in Spanish so far--5 were graded readers, and the other 5 have been standard Spanish fiction books, usually young adult or 8-10 year old range. I'm currently reading the Hunger Games series in Spanish. When I started reading, I was really bad at first, but I noticed that my comprehension picked up pretty quickly. I still have to use a built-in dictionary to get by sometimes, especially with certain parts of The Hunger Games, but it's much better than where I was 2.5 months ago. Word-count-wise, I'm probably around 350k-400k words read total, though the Hunger Games books take up a big chunk of that word count.
I also watch input pretty often. I started with super easy videos on dreaming Spanish, but I slowly built up to watching regular Spanish videos with subtitles. I can watch basic videos without issues, like travel vlogs with subtitles, but I struggle with things like video essays or specialized topics. Overall, I'd say I've hit around 110 hours of input in the 2.5 months since I've started, with about 60 of those hours being reading. I try to practice for around 2 hours a day total. My speaking ability is still pretty bad. I can sometimes speak a full sentence, but I tend to have huge pauses to remember certain verb conjugations, especially subjunctive or certain regular verbs.
Since I'm only 2.5 months in, I'm a little lost on how to proceed. I'm wondering if I should wait to speak (initial plan was to do 300 hours of input before speaking) or should I begin looking for tutors now? Any input appreciated!