Improve your Spanish - Get the Words Out!

Learning a foreign language takes hard work, but it is possible to make significant progress without moving overseas. I finally learned to speak Spanish by finding a partner who was at a similar language level and making a commitment to speak Spanish together regularly. We had both studied Spanish in high school and college, but we made the transition to actually speaking Spanish after 5 months of daily practice.

​What was the key? We spoke to each other in Spanish every day. On some days, we would try to speak Spanish all day. On other days, we spent an hour speaking Spanish. I would not have expected it, but I learned to finally speak Spanish by talking to a native English-speaking partner. Prior to this experience, I would’ve said that in order to learn Spanish, you needed to practice with a native Spanish speaker or you had to move to Mexico. I practiced daily with a native English speaker and now I am able to speak confidently about most topics.

Mexicans compliment me all the time about how well I speak and ask me where I learned to speak Spanish. I learned it by training my brain to just give it a try: Ser or estar? Choose one and say it. Preterite or imperfect? Choose one and go for it.

Lo or le? Pick one and off you go! I have spent time with other Spanish language learners who desperately want their pronouns to be right and their verb conjugations to be perfect. It is painful to talk with them because they spend so much time thinking and translating in their brains that very few words come out. My advice: Get the words out. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake. Just keep going. What did we talk about? We discussed what to make for dinner, we talked about our plans for the weekend, and we reminisced about our favorite movies. The topic was not important. The most important thing was to keep pushing out our ideas in Spanish day after day. The act of trying to conjugate verbs and to create full sentences everyday was the key that unlocked Spanish for me. I transitioned from someone who was trying to learn Spanish to someone who could speak Spanish.