About 10 years ago I accidentally made some spanish-only-speaking friends online, then had to learn spanish! It takes so much work, you can really only last the

About 10 years ago I accidentally made some spanish-only-speaking friends online, then had to learn spanish! It takes so much work, you can really only last the distance if you have to speak it, something I've heard others say. I've since had many thousands of conversations in spanish with friends in many countries, which has been amazing. Constant chatting every day; most of my communication every day was in spanish for years. Also I joined 2 free language-exchange sites (This was 5-10 years ago, I think those sites are different now, but I'm sure others have taken their place) - where they matched me with spanish-speakers who wanted to learn english, we taught each other. One when I'd just started, another about 5 years later. Both people became very dear friends, and we chatted a lot, about everything, not just our languages. I wouldn't try that for a second with my other online spanish-speaking friends–being matched with people who want to teach and learn the right language is invaluable. Both times I met the perfect teacher within a few days of being on the site, and so left. Also I have my computer set to spanish (so the internet thinks I'm a spanish speaker!), watch lots of spanish-language movies/tv series.. and in the early years especially I studied spanish grammar a lot. I feel I've learnt as much about english as about spanish! (and latin, french etc) Good luck! (p.s. One unfortunate side-effect has been that using capital letters for languages/nationalities now seems super-weird to me)