[robocat]

If you are a native English speaker, the #1 trick is to learn the vowel sounds exactly correctly.

Vowel sounds in words extremely variable in English, but are very rigid in Spanish, even in different countries. In Spanish consonants may change their sound in some countries, but the differences are fixed, and it is easily learnable. Get your pronunciation corrected as soon as you begin learning, otherwise you teach yourself bad habits that are hard to break.

English speakers tend to really screw up the vowel sounds in Spanish, which makes words unintelligible to Spanish speakers. The one-to-one correspondence between written vowels and spoken vowel sounds actually makes Spanish quite easy to pick up.

One other trick is to speak English words using Spanish vowel sounds, because Spanish speakers with a little English will often hear the word if you do that. It also helps if you can hear English words spoken with Spanish vowel sounds by Spanish speakers.

If you are in a hick area then the Spanish language can change in other ways which can be difficult to understand (for example eating S’s, ma o meno).

The rumour is that the grammar is hard to learn, but if you only need conversational Spanish then there is one future and one past tense that is easy for English speakers to learn to speak: Voy a = I am going to, He = I have.

[Izikiel43]

I’m a native Spanish speaker, that’s why I say words can change meaning amongst countries. Also, some sounds are pronounced different in different countries.

[robocat]

My mother tongue is English, and I originally learnt conversational Spanish in Sevilla using my own techniques (months not years).

I have subsequently had little trouble communicating with people speaking 100% Spanish when I have travelled (mostly Cuba, Mexico, Majorca) or at home (Chilean, Argentinian etc).

I agree that some words change, and I agree that there are pronunciation changes, but my experience is that the changes are not too difficult to pick up.

Perhaps I am exceptional or not widely enough travelled, but I can only share what I have experienced.

In my opinion, another thing to beware of for anyone learning Spanish is to avoid learning the "correct" pronunciation (sounding like a madrileño). A "proper" accent sounds like you are stuck-up to many people from other countries, which hinders friendly communication. For example: I use an s sound (not th) for 'hace', and dja (not lya) for 'ella'. Aside: Spanish people responded fabulously to me when I had unintentionally picked up a Cuban accent! I have responded really well to people who have picked up a random English accent when they learnt English (except US accents which mostly sound bad to me). Also if you are learning Spanish and native Spanish speakers think you have a strong English accent, you have been teaching yourself using the wrong methods: instead use more mimicking and less reading.