You don’t need more vocabulary. You need someone to interrupt you.

I teach Spanish and Italian. The single most common thing I hear in a first call is some version of: “I understand almost everything, but when I try to speak, nothing comes out.” People say it apologetically, as if it were a personal failing. It is not. It is the completely predictable result of how they have been practising.

Recognition is not retrieval

When an app shows you la mesa and four options, you are recognising. Your brain confirms something it is shown. That is a different mental operation from standing in a kitchen, wanting the word for table, and producing it from nothing in under a second.

You can get very good at the first one and stay bad at the second one indefinitely. That is the plateau. It is not a knowledge problem, so more input does not fix it. You have to practise the thing you are bad at, which is production under mild pressure.

Three things that actually work

• 01Talk about your actual day. Not “topics”. Not the news. What you ate, why your boss annoyed you, the thing you have to do on Thursday. This is the vocabulary you will need forever, and it is the vocabulary courses skip because it is unglamorous.
• 02Let yourself be interrupted. Being corrected at the end of a paragraph teaches almost nothing — the sentence is gone. Being stopped mid-sentence is uncomfortable and it works. Ask for it explicitly, because most people are too polite to do it unprompted.
• 03Twenty minutes, often. Two hours once a month builds nothing. Twenty minutes twice a week builds a lot. Speaking is a motor skill more than an academic one; it behaves like the gym, not like an exam.

On being bad in front of someone

The real obstacle is almost never grammar. It is that speaking badly in front of another adult is humiliating, and we are extremely good at inventing reasons to postpone it. “I’ll start conversation practice when I’ve finished this course.” You will not. The course has no end and that is why you chose it.

The only thing that helps is doing it with someone whose entire job in that moment is to not care that you are bad. I have taught people who could say hola and nothing else on day one. Nobody has ever embarrassed themselves in front of me, because I am not the audience — I am the person holding the door.

Book twenty minutes. Apologise for your Spanish in the first minute, as everyone does. By minute ten you will have forgotten to.