How to learn conversational Spanish
Most people who want conversational Spanish have done a course and can read a menu. Then a Spanish speaker talks to them at normal speed and they catch nothing. The gap is not more lessons. It is three specific things you rarely get from lessons.
The words speech uses
People use a small set of words for most spoken Spanish. Verbs like poder, querer, tener and ir, the little words that glue sentences together, and a few hundred nouns and adjectives that come up in any conversation about daily life. In frequency lists they are ranked, and the top thousand or so make up most of what you will hear.
Learn those first, and learn them so you can produce them from memory. The research on memory is consistent here: in Rowland’s 2014 review, the benefits were larger from recalling an answer than from picking it out of options. In a conversation you have to produce the word in under a second. If you only recognise it in practice, you do not train that.
Learn them in sentences. Tener on a card is “to have”. Tengo que irme is “I have to go”, which is the sentence you will need.
An ear for joined-up speech
You can know every word in ¿Qué es lo que quieres? and still not catch it at speed, because in speech it comes out as one run of sound. Words connect, vowels merge, and a speaker from Madrid, Bogotá and Havana will each do it differently.
This is a separate skill from vocabulary, and it is trained by listening to short recordings you can also read. Play a sentence. Try to catch it. Read it. Play it again. In Why spoken Spanish can be hard to follow you can find out whether a word, the joining or the speed is what you missed, and the reason classroom listening does not transfer on its own is in why your teacher is easier to understand than a stranger.
A recording for every sentence you learn, played whole, is the cheapest listening practice there is. Use it every time.
Saying the words
Reading a sentence and saying it are different acts. Say every sentence you practise out loud, after a recording, matching the rhythm. This is the part of conversation you can do alone. With it the sounds are already in your mouth, so that in a real exchange the words come out instead of forming silently.
The few sounds you need to work on are in Spanish pronunciation: where to start. Spanish has fewer of them than English, and you can tell most of what you need from the spelling.
The phrases that keep a conversation going
You will not understand everything. Nobody does at first. You keep a conversation going with a handful of phrases: asking someone to slow down, to repeat a word, to say it another way, and checking that you understood. What to say when someone speaks Spanish too fast has them. Learn those ten phrases before your first conversation, and you get through the conversation despite your gaps.
When to add a person
A tutor, a language exchange, or a friend who will speak slowly. This is the only practice for the thing itself, and there is no substitute. The question is when.
Too early, and you spend the hour looking up words. Too late, and you never start. A workable point: when you can follow a slow recording on a familiar topic and produce a few hundred words without thinking. For most people that is a month or two of the practice above.
Then once a week, and keep the solo practice going between. The words you come across in conversation go into your practice. The words you practise show up in the next conversation. That loop is how conversational Spanish gets built.
What we can and cannot do for this
In Vozelu you build the first three: the common words in real sentences, typed from memory, each with a recorded voice to listen to and say after, and each word asked again on a schedule set by your answers. Vozelu also has 20 dialogues, short conversations such as a first date or a job interview, in which you play one of the people. You say your lines out loud or type them. When you say a line, we check that we recognised every word. If we missed one, you say the line again. You can play your recording and then the same line read by a recorded voice. For the conversation itself you need a person, and with the practice here that hour is worth having.