I’ll be keeping you up to date with my Spanish learning progress here. I had been studying Spanish on and off for many years before moving to Spain, but had not got beyond the beginner stage. Living in a Spanish speaking country has obviously helped me advance a lot, but don’t let anyone tell you that you will just ‘absorb’ the language by osmosis. It is communication with others that helps all the book learning to stick. I have the slight complication of living in Barcelona so I hear Catalan more often than Spanish amongst my friends. But everyone is very helpful and they switch without a hitch although it means that my level of ambient listening is not as high as it could be.
I also work in an mainly English speaking environment, so that cuts 8 hours of potential practice out of each day, but you have to earn a living and it is an advantage in the workplace for me to be a native English speaker.
So what about you? What is your level and how are you helping yourself to find opportunities to speak the language?