If your first language is English, speaking Spanish or any other language is going to require getting over some emotional barriers. It isn’t enough just to learn all that vocabulary… no, you have to deal with yourself too!
What I mean is this:
If you want to learn how to speak in Spanish, at a certain point you may encounter a good bit of shyness or resistance within you. This is natural. You might mess up. You might mispronounce something or suddenly go blank. So you may have a little voice inside you insisting that you not even try the new language.
Here in Mexico, I see this all the time with Mexicans who are reluctant to try out their English with me. They may volunteer a word or two, and if I ask them if they speak English, they may squirm and say a little. Once or twice, when that has happened, it has turned out that they speak far better English than I do Spanish!
But back to you. If you studied Spanish in school the way most Mexicans studied English in school, conversation took a back seat to grammar, vocabulary, and reading. If you know no Spanish, in some ways it may be easier for you to overcome this natural blockage.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Not everyone has this problem. Extroverts and non-perfectionists may experience it less.
What to Do if You are Reluctant to Speak in Spanish
Practice with one of the programs that has you repeating phrases over and over. You can do this while walking, driving, cooking, waiting, or at any other odd moments. I particularly like Rocket Spanish and Pimsleur Spanish for this practice, as they are designed as primarily audio programs… the links take you to my descriptions of them on the main website. But any program you listen to will help with this. Your public library may have something, or I’m sure there have to be good free ways to learn Spanish online.
Whatever you use — and it’s fine to use a combination of things — this practice will give you more confidence, as the words will become engrained in your memory. The Pimsleur Method course actually has a schedule of how often they repeat words, based on what is known about how our memories work. This is useful as you learn to speak in Spanish first just to yourself and later to the world!
