Maybe just focus on comparing yourself to yourself from a year ago rather than comparing to anyone else. It's easy to get discouraged otherwise.

For speaking practice though, I've heard that "shadowing" can be useful. Basically you listen to a section of audio, pause playback, try to say what you heard and then listen to the same clip again. From there it's just a matter of repeat repeat repeat.

There's also a method called shadowing where you try to repeat what you hear in real time without pausing but I think that just ends up being hard and frustrating. It might help for particular words or phrases but I don't think it's good to do instead of what I described before.