Immerse yourself.
Learn how to pronounce the vowel sounds. Get an agatha christie novel in english and also a spanish translation. Read them side by side, aloud or moving your lips silently. At the beginning you’ll be checking every sentence but as you progress through the book you’ll need it less and less. Why? Because Agatha Christie novels repeat the vocabulary since the stories almost always take place ina closed environment (ex.,hotel, country house, train) with limited characters who are described repeatedly by appearance and gestures, so you pick up synonyms for these. Finally, the grammar is straightforward and the translations use parallel Spanish grammar, and after a chapter or two you begin to get the correlation. Likewise the vocabulary has many cognates, words that look or sound similar.
Same thing with Spanish movies. Get the Spanish version of an English movie. Watch Spanish soap operas.
Solicit spanish supermarkets and businesses.
You can also go online and look at spanish newspapers and magazines and listen to spanish radio.
Then, invest in a ticket to a spanish speaking country or Puerto Rico. Just listen and see what you can understand and try to communicate.
Volunteer to work with the spanish-speaking community.
You will need eventually to have a native speaker to speak with, friend or tutor. If it’s a tutor, make sure the tutor helps you discuss the sorts of things you want to talk about, whether it’s sports or social justice or art or whatever, and doesn’t try to cram some formulaic textbook pap down your throat. If you can’t talk fluently about what you want to talk about or will actually have to talk about it will be very sad and lonely.
