How To Practice Speaking Spanish
The first thing we must do is separate 'learning' from 'practice'. Have you ever considered that before?
Learning is really about understanding something, and once you understand something it becomes part of your long term knowledge - you don't forget it so easily.
Practicing is all about perfecting what you have learnt. Specifically with speaking Spanish this means getting faster and more confident so you can achieve fluency.
Assuming you have already gone some way into learning verbs and a little vocabulary, whats the best way to practice it?
Obviously if you have the opportunity to practice speaking Spanish with a native speaker it's ideal however most of us will not have that luxury. Many people simply bypass this and as they go about their day, they try to think of how to say this or that in Spanish. That process will force you to learn a highly usable pool of vocabulary and get you thinking in everyday Spanish. Even if you make mistakes don't worry... the most important thing is to start thinking things out in the language.
It's like taking your mind to a mental gym, it gives it a workout and at first this is going to seem pretty hard work but honestly there's no other way. Practicing is hard and takes a lot of mental effort.
In the early stages you'll find you need a lot of thinking time in order to produce a sentence, especially when using Spanish verbs, vocabulary or tenses for the first time. You should quickly find however that a core vocabulary will form and you'll get quite fast when speaking in this 'comfort zone'.
That's the real way to feel confident when speaking Spanish - make your core vocabulary count and feel very comfortable within it. Use audio courses that concentrate on asking you things in English and wait for you to translate it into Spanish... use that pause button to give yourself however long you need to think it out! That's very important. Your mind must do the work, not the audio course.
Aside from that, keep asking yourself 'how would I say this in Spanish?' as you go about your day. Start the process of trying to think in Spanish now, the sooner the better!