whaat

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.

Let it be known you can be called at all hours, day and night, in case a friend needs to talk in the middle of the night.
Make sure when your phone or address change to drop a quick line or call friends even if you haven’t heard from them or they from you in ages.
I have terrific friends that we went though years sometimes out of touch. Eventually I/they tracked the other/me down and re-established contact.
Visit your friends faraway even if it strains your budget.
Once every few months (or years, even if it’s embarrassing) shoot a message to friends you don’t see much - just to say hey, thinkin’ of you, hope all’s well - you don’t have to go into what you’re doing now.
When you run across an article or doodad or whatever that is just what a particular friend would go for, get it and send/give it to them. This is NOT the same as mass e-mailing jokes and stuff!
My brother jots down people’s birthdays along with addresses and files it in a daily calender rolodex type thing with the info filed in a date about a week ahead of their birthday. So when the date comes out, he whips out a postcard or e-mails or calls to say happy birthday - he has stayed in touch with god knows how many people this for years - including some of my friends and colleagues. Some I’ve lost touch with, then met up with them years later and they tell me oh yer brother sends me a birthday card every year! ( Now THAT’s embarrassing)
My friends are all eccentric but not alike—Lots of my friends wouldn’t really hang with each other as their interests and personalities are so diffrent they’d actually dislike each other.
It’s totally worth it—it is THE MOST WORTHWHILE THING YOU CAN EVER DO IN YOUR LIFE!

http://www.fcps.edu/DIS/OHSICS/forlang/amslan.htm#anchor-dictionary