paso 1: haz tuyo el alemán
It's great that you want to practice German with locals. If you're already in 🇩🇪🇦🇹🇨🇭, you can check out Meetup.com to go to events near you. However, don't leave your speaking practice only for these situations. You can practice speaking German DAILY by speaking to yourself without judging how you're speaking or if you're making mistakes. This will help you A LOT MORE than speaking once a week with locals.
Speaking German cannot be done without listening to a lot of it ON PURPOSE and FULLY FOCUSED. Your brain will not know how to make the sounds German needs (including its melody) if you don't listen to enough targeted German. Listen to podcasts or videos about topics you like or if it feels like too much, comment "Audio" and I'll send you the link to our free German audios.
German grammar teaches you isolated "tricks" that you are supposed to magically apply when speaking or writing. The best way to know how to construct German, conjugage verbs, put words into the right order, use the right adjective and article declension, etc. etc. is to LEARN & PRACTICE PHRASE BLOCKS. Phrase Blocks carry already an idea inside them and therefore you are not only learning how something is correctly formed in German, you can use it to express an idea. In your own language you don't use grammar with vocabulary, everything is integrated. Phrase Blocks are exactly how a native speaker speaks and you can save a lot of frustration by embracing them. Comment "Blocks" if you want to know more.
Start by reading things that you LOVE. Pick your favorite topic and look for texts on it. The fact that you love the topic already will make things much easier. The typical method approach is reading things you hate or don't care about. Learning a language needs to be engaging & useful for you to care enough. Once you start the habit of reading about things you like, you will not have any issue in reading the boring websites or letters you got in the mail :)
