Yes my spanish friend, sometimes has a job understanding me as her husband is English and Im Welsh so when i speak quickly she does have a problem understanding me. I do think i must be more confident and have a go on those interactive sessions.
I can do this as i have rosetta stone package, and have an opportunity to speak espanol with a native spanish speaker, but have always booked a session on line then cancelled at the last minute.
As when i plan, I will have visitors or family crisis arrives on the doorstep etc.
Plus also on some occasions I have simply chickened out.
Sad soul as i am.
i am determined now to book a session and see how i get on.

The trouble is by the time I have thought of using another tense the moment has gone and so has my companion. I do try and talk to random people, say in a shop or walking along the street. Just snippets here and there. Will try and remember the (e) on the verb for the future though.

My advice to anyone wanting to be able to converse at a fairly fluid and decent pace in Spanish would be to forget the endings for all the tenses and learn Haber (aux) inside out.

Then use He, Has Ha etc with the "ido or ado" endings.

So in fact instead of sayin I bought, she bought, they bought etc, you can say, " I have bought, they have bought, HE COMPRADO, HAN COMPRADO etc.

With the HABER and the Ido /ado, lots of phrases can be said, with minimal thinking, and most of what we say to other people is about things that have happened before, so the "I have lost/forgotten/sold/been etc" fits in well with the recounting of an event.

Of course expect the usual clangers freido and hacido, escribido.

Instead of learing all the tenses for each individual verb, learn each tense for haber, then the past part for the verb you need, ie comido,.

Much easier and it will give you a lot more confidence as it is so much easier, and will get you going faster.

yes, that's the first 'past' that I teach - soooo easy to grasp & so very useful

You make it sound so easy! Problem is there is no such word as tenere, it's tendré It's irregular, along with many others, caber (cabr-), haber (habr-), hacer (har-), poner (pondr-), poder (podr-), salir (saldr-), tener (tendr-), valer (valdr-) and venir (vendr-).

Also if the accent on the "e" is not right it will sound more like Italian.... and we wouldnt want that now..................

Yes, there's a few of them, somehow, "Españoles, Franco ha morito" doesn't sound right! Muerto sounds much better.

That's the kind of advice I could have done with years ago, instead of the various Spanish teachers I had over that time.

I'm a foreigner and when I engage with Spanish people they know I am before I even open my mouth. If I lived in Spain for a hundred years, that wouldn't change.

I can converse well enough but with a strong English accent, and I sometimes play on it if I'm in trouble. I got stopped in a Guardia Civil road block the other week and pretended I didn't know what Suma meant, because I had forgotten to renew the thing, it was only a couple of days out.

The officer gave up and sent me on my way with a ticking off.

It is very useful to know how to speak Spanish, but sometimes more usefull not to know Spanish, you know what I mean Arry? (said with a Frank Bruno accent)

I wish you lived near me I could do with a good teacher
but I may be the student that will make you want to retire early.

about 40 of the 50 of them say that to me on at least a weekly basis - none of us have given up yet!!!

Well yes, i didn't say it worked for all but for alot it does! And the others all follow the same pattern, tendre, pondre, saldre....so it's easy to remember those too!

I was talking to a Scottish woman who was pleased because she was going to be teaching the army English.
I can expect a Spanish soldier to come up to me one day in the future and say 'awaa wid ye' or something equally incoherent.

Oh - for English keyboards that don't have an ñ, just open a file on your desktop, copy and save an ñ and an Ñ (and, what the hell, a ç as well). you can drop them into your text easily enough. The Spanish (even the ones with a Scottish accent) would approve.