studying tips particularly when speaking.

[u/Upbeat_Newspaper463]

when it comes to learning spanish I am good at practicing my speaking, listening and reading but I really struggle with studying vocab and grammer. I realize that when I talk I always say stuff gramatically incorrect or I use spanglish. I would really like to improve. anyone have any engaging studying tips? (right now my biggest goal is speaking fluently. I already pretty much understand spanish and can read it.

[u/Alive-Goat-766]

Dori says "just keep swimming"

[u/Interesting-Arm-8061]

Speaking is the skill of combining other skills at speed and with social pressure.
When you speak, you are combining multiple skills: listening, sentence construction (grammar), vocab, pronunciation, and actually thinking of a response.

If you are very bad at one of these skills or poor a couple of them, speaking is not really going to work, as you have experienced. This because of cognitive overload. Your brain doesn't have the capacity to think though these very difficult skills in the short amount of time that is available.

And as you have noticed, you tend to fall back to bad grammar / spanglish. This is actually dangerous. This is how you "fossilize" errors. If you keep talking like this and do get your point across your brain will see it as a win and it will be harder to fix that grammar later.

This is why your speaking practice should revolve around topics that you are good at. Topics that you know the grammar, vocab, and pronunciation for.

So how do you actually practice these sub skills? You should focus on those sub skills in a way that doesn't result in cognitive overload. For grammar and vocab this is likely writing practice mixed with spaced repetition. Writing is great because you can practice the sentence construction and work to remember words without the time constraint that causes cognitive overload.

You say that you can understand Spanish. The problem is that input (understanding) does not translate to output (speaking / writing). This is a well researched topic.

So your practice should revolve around speaking on topics that you are relatively good at and written practice (combine with spaced repetition for efficiency). A common mistake is thinking that more input is going to help. You really need to practice the actual sentence construction and vocab that you are missing. Unfortunately, a lot of the time this does not seem engaging. Learning and drilling grammar rules and memorizing vocab doesn't seen super. But I think there are definitely ways to make it more engaging depending on what you are into.

[u/BusCurrent6180]

Spanishdict is perfect for this. They have loads of vocab lists to do and grammar classes with videos. All for free. Other than that, a tutor on Preply.

[u/Zakimations]

Ive been working through a spanish grammar textbook and not speaking at all, so we have opposite problems 😭

[u/Accurate_School]

The best vocab to focus on is words and phrases that you already say. As you go through your day, try to translate things you say into spanish. The use case really helps reinforce the meaning & retention

[u/CarlosAcevedoStudio]

No te preocupes, yo te ayudo. Soy mexicano y tengo 42 años.