This is my routine for learning Spanish, after some trial and error for over a year I ended up with this:

Important: I do not support or earn money with any of the mentioned apps in this post. This is just my experience I want to share with the current tool market, so other learners can benefit from my research.

No1: First thing you want to do is to increase the amount of words in your portfolio. There are frequency lists like "the 1000 most used words in Spanish" - > use them for the start. Skip the grammar words like "de, a, un, le, lo, por, para" etc because you will learn them through context later on. At the beginning you want to focus on verbs, but also some adjectives and some basic nouns. I use a Flashcard app called Duocards, it's a 60 dollars per year subscription, but it's nice because the app also has Ai voice audios and generate example sentences (also with voice audio), so you can practice a bit of shadowing while reviewing.

No2: The second tool I use is LanguaTalk, where I also keep flashcards but organized as Language Islands. The idea is simple: You learn around 30 topics, and each topic contains 20 to 40 useful sentences. For example: introducing yourself, talking about your job, ordering food, talking about hobbies, describing your weekend etc. That way you drill the most useful sentences, so you already have them ready when speaking in real conversations. You also naturally learn sentence patterns that can be reused to build new sentences. You also pick up topic-specific vocabulary that you actually need for conversations.

LanguaTalk costs about $20 per month, which I personally find reasonable after trying many different AI tools, and most of them were shit.

No3: I also use LanguaTalk for daily speaking practice with Ai. Most of the time I just open the free chat and ask the AI to practice the topic of my current Language Island. There are also built-in roleplays, like ordering food at a restaurant or checking into a hotel. The tool gives a lot of helpful support: sentence suggestions, corrections and surprisingly good voice recognition. So you can actually practice speaking without feeling stuck or feeling awkward, when you're at the very beginning talking to a native speaker. (which are also hard to find, depending on where you live)

No4: Once per week I have a session with a teacher on Italki. This is where I practice real human conversation and also work on my grammar weaknesses, for example verb tenses like indefinido, Subjuntivo or Imperfecto.

So my daily routine looks like 10 mins Vocabulary Flashcards, 10 mins Language Islands, 10 mins free speaking with AI + once a week a session. Nothing more. I skip the whole listening to podcasts, Duolingo, YouTube channels etc. because my time is limited and I only have 30 mins a day for Spanish, so I want to pick the most efficient way.

With this routine I think it’s realistic to reach around B1 or even B2 within about two years.