How to Practice Spanish in Real Life (The Right Way)

By the end of this guide, you’ll know the three things your real-life Spanish practice has to include if you actually want to get better. 

Step 1: Talk to Native Speakers

The first thing your Spanish practice needs is native Spanish speakers. The fact is, who you practice with can make or break your progress. 

If you’re practicing Spanish with people who are also learning Spanish, it’s probably not helping you much. That’s because when two English speakers talk in Spanish to each other, what they’re probably doing is actually just speaking English with Spanish words.

Both of you are thinking in English and structuring sentences in English, but you’re swapping in Spanish vocabulary like it’s a game of language Mad Libs. That leads to terrible grammar and speaking habits that might make you completely unintelligible to real Spanish speakers.

That’s not what learning Spanish is. Learning Spanish means restructuring your sentences and even the whole way that you think. It means building new mental models, and learning to communicate like a Spanish speaker would, not just like an English speaker using Spanish words.

Here’s the bottom line: If you’re practicing Spanish with someone who is not a native Spanish speaker, your practice might be reinforcing the wrong habits. This is why I would generally avoid practicing broken Spanish with another Spanish learner. Instead, find native Spanish speakers to practice with.

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Step 2: Get Real Corrections from Real Coaches 

The second thing your Spanish practice needs is productive correction and coaching on your mistakes. Even if you’re practicing with native speakers, that isn’t enough if they’re not actually helping you get better.

If your conversation partner never corrects your mistakes— while it may be building your confidence—but your actual core expressive accuracy might not be getting any better. 

Now, the person you’re talking with probably shouldn’t nitpick every tiny thing you say wrong, but they should help you fix your biggest weaknesses so that you can improve.

For example, let’s say you say this:

• Barcelona es en España.

This is a common mistake and one that can lead to serious problems in communication down the road, so your conversation partner should correct you and tell you that this should be:

• Barcelona está en España.

But even that isn’t enough. They should be able to explain why something is wrong. A good coach won’t just say, “that’s how Spanish works” — that’s not a good way to learn. 

Instead, they’d say: “When talking about location, even the permanent location of something like cities, we use Estar, not Ser. Ser is for what something is. Estar is for where it is or how it is.”

That kind of correction doesn’t just fix a mistake. It helps you build a mental model of how Spanish works, so you won’t make that mistake again.

Now, here’s the hard truth: If your tutor only costs $5/hour, you’re probably not getting this kind of feedback. They might nod and say “close enough”… or just correct you and move on without really explaining why.

And that means you’re not just wasting your money — you’re wasting your time.

If you’re serious about fluency, invest in an expert linguistic coach who can explain the why, not just correct the what. Someone who helps you understand Spanish from the inside out and build your fluency from the foundations up.

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Step 3: Balance Conversation with Study 

The third thing your Spanish practice needs is balance. You have to combine your conversation practice with solo study.

Even if you’re working with a great native-Spanish-speaking coach, conversation alone won’t make you fluent. You have to go off and do some studying as well to learn new words and to drill skills on your own.

Here’s the rule I give to all my coaching students: For every 1 hour of Spanish conversation, you should spend 5 to 10 hours learning, reviewing, and drilling on your own.

Let’s go back to our Ser vs. Estar example. Maybe in your conversation you were told how to say Barcelona está en España.

That’s great, but there’s a next step: Now you need to solidify that into a mental model that will apply to other things, not just this one sentence. Maybe you spend a few hours doing deep-dive practice with Estar, especially for describing where or how something is:

• La casa está en la ciudad. (The house is in the city.) — this tells us where it is.
• Nosotros estamos en la playa. (We’re at the beach.) — another location.
• Yo estoy bien. (I’m good.) — this tells us how someone is, not what they are.
• Ella está triste. (She’s sad.) — someone’s condition, or how she is.

Then you might spend some time doing the same with Ser, which is used to describe what something is — its identity or definition:

• La casa es grande. (The house is big.) — that’s what the house is.
• Es una ciudad. (It is a city.) — we’re defining what the city is.
• Ellos son amigos. (They are friends.) — that tells us what they are, which is friends.
• Nosotros somos estudiantes. (We are students.) — again, that’s what we are.

You need to study these sentences, write variations on your own, and drill them with flashcards.

That is how you build mental models. Not just by using things a few times in conversations, but by doing grammar drills and training your brain to see the pattern and think in Spanish — so that when you go back to speaking in real life, the right structure comes naturally. 

That’s the kind of solo study that will give you real confidence in conversation — training yourself to pull up the right structure automatically on the fly.

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Work with a LearnCraft Coach

To recap, these are the three things your Spanish conversation practice needs:

1. Facetime with native Spanish speakers
2. Productive correction and coaching on your mistakes
3. Solo study time to balance out your face-to-face practice.

Here’s the good news: You don’t have to figure this out on your own.

We’ve built an evidence-based coaching system that actually works — not guesswork, but a real, step-by-step training program that will get you fluent.

When you join LearnCraft Spanish Coaching, you get:

• 1-on-1 practice with native-speaking Spanish experts who actually know how to fix your weak points
• Custom lesson plans tailored to your level and goals
• Personalized feedback that helps you turn your biggest struggles into strengths
• A daily study plan that drills your skills so they actually stick

It’s like having a personal trainer, but for your Spanish brain.

If you’ve been spinning your wheels trying to get fluent, this is your breakthrough moment.

The easiest way to start working with a Spanish coach is by joining our Spanish in One Month Challenge.

It’s a 30-day grammar bootcamp focused on the top 100 words and the core sentence structures that real Spanish fluency is built on. You’ll get step-by-step lessons, access to our custom quizzing app to drill things deeply — plus real feedback from our expert native-speaking coaches to help you improve every step of the way. 

Just make sure to add coaching at checkout and your coach will work with you all month.

We’re here to help you practice Spanish in real life — the right way.

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