I've never been in the chatrooms here (I did try once, but it crashed my computer) so I'm not sure if this would work...but is there any way you could go in anonymously and just look around until you feel comfortable chatting? That way you wouldn't have to worry about people judging - which I'm sure they don't do, but all the same, it might make things easier.

I don't find chatrooms easy, either, but I'm mostly worried about people getting impatient with me - when I'm posting in forums I always check my responses before submitting them, and I'll sometimes try out a few different phrasings so I can hopefully get my point across more effectively...if I tried to do the same in chatrooms, people would be waiting about five minutes for me to reply every time they said something to me.

Anyway, hope you can find something that works. If you don't like the chatrooms, there's nothing wrong with just sticking to the forums, anyway.