Well, let's look at it this way...

You can't be expected to swim thirty laps the first time you ever get into a pool, nor can you be expected to play like Paganini the first time you pick up a violin.

So, expect that your first attempts may be awful.  Even as you progress, expect that you may make laughable mistakes and confuse simple words. It happens to all of us - I'm sure we all have a funny story to tell! The important thing is to pay attention, learn from any mistakes, and keep going.

As I understand it, "Speaking from day one" simply means opening your mouth and saying the words in the language you want to speak. It's even better if you have someone who knows the language and can give you feedback.

Benny also gives some wise advice here:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/the-smartest-decision-you-will-ever-make-to-achieve-fluency/

Don't use your first language as your "safety net". Avoid the people who think it's OK to speak back to you in English when you want to speak their language. My best language progress always happened when English was not an option.

Once you've started speaking, it gets easier. ;) Good luck!

I'm trying to learn English... I can read and listening and understand about 60%-70%, but I can't speak or write.

I'm chatting everyday with a guy from Australia about poker and today I suggested to speak over voice on Skype. He accepts. My confidence is about 10%... (lol).

Well, if you want to learn speak portuguese, I could hear you one or two days a week easily. There are so many people on Brazil that want/need learn English and I think it's easy find someone to do this exchange.

Contact me if you want to speak portuguese somedays a week. Ignore if you have 0% confidence, just start! We live so far, so there is no reason to be afraid to speak wrong or something else.

Cheers.

From my experience I tried to get my confidence by practising to read a text loudly just like a newspresenter. This is not merely a habitual and enjoyable practice but also a constant phonetic check and recheck through a reliable dictionary as well as always listening to a native newscaster.  I think the method of speaking from day one is to practise step by step from basic phrases like greetings, responses, simple requests, simple questions etc that are available for repetition. We should be outspoken and not refrain from talking (at least interaction in gesture) to our interlocutor.

If you're a bit nervous about speaking to people I'd recommend Michel Thomas's course as it's an audio course where you are a student in class and you speak out loud. That helped with my ability to form sentences quicker than i used to and also to make me more confident.

I'd also recommend getting a language tutor on here or a partner and meeting regularly. I'm trying for three times a week as when I was doing just once a week i was still really nervous speaking as it'd been a whole week since i had spoken it.

Also there are some good videos on youtube which you can practice along with.

I am learning Russian and I take Russian lessons here, therefore I have to speak during my sessions, even though my Russian totally sucks and it's -0 :P

I have this nice guy from Russia on my whatsapp, what we do is, he sends me audio messages in English and I reply as well in English so he can practice, sometimes I send him audio messages in Russian, stupid ones, like " Good morning, how are you? What are you doing? ", even though it sounds a bit weird, you have to, everything that you learn, you should put it in practice.