If you want to pronounce Spanish sounds better, a teacher can help. And a teacher can also help bed down the grammatical structures you have learned and develop them further.
However, it seems that your concern is that you can’t yet converse. To hold basic conversations, we need enough words (verbs and nouns in particular, but other verbal resources as well) available in our mental store to be pulled out instantly and passed through our mouths, all the while trying to hear and understand the words coming at us from one or more interlocuters (along with the non-verbal clues they are sending us). The words have to be orally producible words, that is, words that we have consciously learned and practiced speaking (as opposed to words we can simply recognize in writing from the context). We need 2000 of these producible words in Spanish just to be able to hold a basic conversation. The closer to 10,000 producible words we get, the more wide-ranging and rewarding our conversations become. Beyond 10,000, and we are flying. But we don’t get to numbers of that magnitude by attending private or group language classes. We have to do it ourselves.
Most probably, you have two problems to solve: you don’t yet have a sufficiently sizeable producible vocabulary, and you don’t have enough in common with local native speakers to enter into conversations that allow you to use the vocabulary you already have and develop it further. We have to solve both those problems. We can. And the beauty is that the solution to each problem is also the solution to the other. It is a virtuous circle. But we have to enter it.
The quickest way to enter it is to forget about the rest of the world. Immerse ourselves in this world. Language teaching calls it culture (many Spanish programs are called “Spanish Language and Culture”, as if there even were such a thing). Like much of language teaching as an academic field and pedagogy, it’s wrong-headed. It’s not about immersing yourself in the culture (although local cultural activities can certainly be part and parcel) so much as it is about immersing yourself local “goings on”. We have to learn about the things that the people who live in one particular part of the Spanish-speaking world (Buenos Aires, in our case) talk about. We have to be able to (and want to) engage with local people in their language on the things they talk about to each other. Unless we live with a Spanish speaker, we don’t get there by mixing with other foreigners in English or other languages. We don’t get there by remaining plugged into (via media and social networks etc.) the “goings on” in our home countries in our native language (if we insist on remaining plugged into them, we need to start following them in Spanish; choose CNN en Español over CNN, for example). We don't get there by following expat websites and posting in English about culture wars back home or wars in Europe. We need to start following the goings on (political, social, economic, sporting and yes, of course, cultural) here through, for example, local electronic media and television channels of our choice. And through newspapers; because we need to read. We need to read lots. Reading is one of the most efficient ways to build vocabulary. But not passively. The words we read won’t become producible vocabulary simply because we read them. We need a pen and paper at hand, or a dictaphone installed on our cel. We need to record the words we read and that we think we will find helpful. Then we need to practice them verbally and practice saying them in sentences. We need to do the same on the street. We need to be attentive to the words we hear spoken around us. Record them or jot them down as soon as possible. Then add them to a written list we keep at home and build towards our first goal of 2000 words and our later goal of 10,000. And work them. Many times, both with pen and paper and by speaking them.
Let’s ask ourselves this question: what is the measure of success in speaking a foreign language? The answer is being able to converse with a native speaker of that language. How can we converse with a native speaker in their language on anything other than a rudimentary level if we don’t know enough about their world (and the vocabulary that describes it) to have anything interesting to say to them about their world and no particular interest in the receiving back their information and opinions about their world?
Now let’s ask ourselves these questions: can we think of any native English speaker who has reached conversational fluency in a foreign language and doesn’t also intimately know the goings on in at least one place with that language is spoken? And can we think of any native English speaker who intimately knows the goings on in at least one place where a foreign language is spoken and is not also conversationally fluent in that language? For native English speakers, the two competencies go together: conversational fluency in a foreign language and fluency in the goings on of a particular place on the globe where that foreign language is spoken. We can’t have one without the other; if we have one, we also have the other. To achieve one is to also achieve the other.
And they are mutually reinforcing: the virtuous circle kicks in: the more we learn about the goings on here in the language that the goings on occur, the more interested we become in them. And the more we want to learn about them. And so we read and hear more about them. And the more conversations we find ourselves having with locals in their language about the goings on. These conversations help us learn even more while also building our conversational competence and confidence. We start acquitting ourselves better and better. And, most amazingly (and usefully) of all, the longer this process goes on, the easier it becomes to switch off from the goings on (in English) of wherever home is; those goings on become less and less interesting. This process happens without us even being aware that it is happening. We only realize it in retrospect when we are up over the 10,000-word mark and wonder how on earth we got to the point of conversing fluently in a second language and on a range of subjects we previously didn't even know existed.
Summary. We have to solve the conversation problem on our own. We have to immerse ourselves in the goings on here by reading and listening and noting down and practicing the vocabulary that people here use to describe the world they inhabit and the activities that they perform in that world. We have to work hard to shut out the goings on elsewhere (or find ways to follow them in Spanish). Once we’ve managed that and built to a productive oral vocabulary of 2000 words, we have reached the lower reaches of the critical mass of goings on knowledge and the vocabulary that comes with it to be equipped to enter the virtuous circle. And once inside the circle, we may never leave. Because we mightn’t want to; we might only want to keep going deeper.
