Foreign Langauge

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I just started learning Spanish and Im having a difficulty learning how to pronouce the words or understanding the spoken language. My reading and writing abilities are fine. I've taken anther langauge before but this was in highschool and my teacher was super easy and really didnt put any emphasis on speaking or listening components of the class. Has anyone had this problem with learning a foreign language?

No. My problems with learning foreign languages have always been that, a) my short-term, or "learning" memory suffers under stress or excitement, and b) I am easily distra Oooo ... Shiny! I love shiny things!

N'est-ce pas?

I've studied my own language and one other to understand WHY English is difficult for others. If you were to discover it like I do, you would probably be surprised yourself.

I'm learning a new language from scratch, MY way ... with some help of a cute native speaker, except she doesn't me calling her "cute" arrrrggghh [BITES LIP] fiinnnneee, so I call her "darling" in her own language. She doesn't seem to mind. I even say it in English too.

I'm learning well I think... Just too slowly. I can pronounce probably 70% of all the words. Some need more concentration .....

Instead of just trying to speak in another language, I imagine the sentence in my mind, and read it out loud. It is slower, but I get understood. The only problem is that it bugs people because I roll my eyes when I am reading in my mind.

I've always thought I had poor pronunciation of pretty much any language I've studied, but I always seem to do better than everyone else. My German professor was pretty impressed, anyway. She thought I had a lot more experience than I really had (which was about none).

The best advice I can give, aside from just practicing a lot, is to learn about the field of phonetics and how speech sounds are produced and used in many languages. In learning Spanish, you may not think it's useful to know how to pronounce words in another language, but it does help you get a feel for a fuller range of sounds.

Many of the mistakes you'll make when learning a foreign language are tiny things that you may not get unless you understand the physiology of speech. Things like how rounded your lips are and the shape of your tongue. In general, most of these things won't interfere with communication much, but you can still get rid of them and sound better with practice and understanding.

I studied French and speaking was always my worst area. I found what helped a bit was listening to audio clips with transcripts so I could see the words and hear how they were pronounced at the same time.

I don't think of speaking as my worst area in learning spanish.
I think you just need the time to practice conversation. Not enough language classes do this nowadays, which is a shame, because that's the point of learning a new language. I've noticed that a lot of teachers want your grammar to be perfect before you start speaking, and that doesn't really help in confidence when you finally do speak.
Just try getting the message across, and worry about the grammar as you go along.

I hope you keep up your studies. Spanish seems like a mostly straightforward language to me, because I studied French for a long time, and even though it's my favourite foreign language, it's a lot more difficult to understand, with all those silent letters at the end, and words that sound the same (il parle/ils parlent, etc.). Anyway, if you're in a situation where you would have to converse with a Spanish-speaking person, I'm sure they wouldn't rip on you if you're not perfect.