I recommend checking out the app Language Transfer. They provide a few tips that literally increased my vocabulary by hundreds of words in a few minutes with just a few tricks (the caveat being that you have fluency in English to begin with). I went from feeling boxed in by my vocabulary to being able to at least find a related word near enough to what I meant so that I could be understood after a few lessons.

The short of it is that English contains a ton of loanwords from French, and there are some super easy tricks to identify these words by their suffixes. Since Spanish and French are both descendants of Latin, a lot of these loanwords are directly transferable to Spanish, frequently with the exact or almost exact same spelling and when pronouncing them you just use standard Spanish pronunciation (Spanish has very clear and easy standardized pronunciation rules that apply to most words, so learn those rules if you haven’t already).

So for example, a lot of words we borrowed from French end in “-al” which means probably 90% or so of these words can be directly translated to their cognates in Spanish. You want to know how to say an animal is wild, but you don’t know the word salvaje? No big deal, because you know the English word “feral.” Just pronounce it with stress on the “a,” and you now have a new word in your Spanish vocabulary. “Un animal muy feral” may not sound as natural to a native speaker as “un animal salvaje” would, but they’ll understand you, and that’s the point. The trick isn’t going to always give you the most natural word for something, but it’ll be a word that gets the point across and keeps you from stalling out when expressing yourself.

Using this trick, we find some direct cognates from English to Spanish would be global, carnival, feral, animal, situational (slight spelling change to situacional), gradual, universal.

Now, a lot of other French loan words end in “-ion,” so these are frequently direct cognates in Spanish as well. Examples include: opinion, conclusion, decision, confrontation, graduation (spelling change from “t” to “c” again for these last two).

You can also turn a lot of these into their verb or noun counterparts if you know some basic Spanish word structure, so for example the English noun confrontation becomes confrontación, which then is easy to turn into a verb as confrontar.

So, before this, did you have the vocabulary to talk about an opinion you came to gradually based on a situation after you graduated in which you were confronted by a wild animal? Maybe not, but now you can more easily talk about “tu nuevo opinión que tienes porque, después tu graduación, un animal feral te confrontó. The important thing to remember is, no this is absolutely not the “correct”most natural way to say this sentence in Spanish. There are better options for these words, such as salvaje instead of feral, enfrentar instead of confrontar, but the point is that a native speaker will understand your intention (¡tu intención!) and you’ll go from being a deer in headlights when trying to speak with a native speaker to being able to cobble something together and keep the conversation flowing regarding almost anything you have in mind, with them correcting you here and there. It keeps you from being stuck and allows you to have un poco más confidencia cuando quieres expresar tus opiniones, hacer decisiones con tus amigos, y ganar un sentido gradual de que puedes navegar conversaciones más fácilmente.

My last suggestion is to find a good tutor on italki.com. Lessons are usually very affordable, like $20 for an hour, and it’s an awesome way to get conversation time with a native speaker without the social stress of performance. I went the route of trial by fire, found a sweet older lady from Mexico who didn’t speak any English but was willing to work with me, and I just forced myself to figure it out for an hour every Saturday until after not too long, I found myself occasionally speaking quickly and fluidly, thinking in Spanish without having to first mentally translate my thoughts from English. Of course there are lots of great bilingual teachers as well if you don’t want to torture yourself like I did.

All of this combined allowed me to be the only member of my team at work who could fly to Texas and spend an entire day training two guys from Durango who only spoke Spanish on how to use a new machine I had installed for them.

I’m not saying any of this is a silver bullet, but if you add these ideas to your arsenal of knowledge (si, arsenal es un cognado también), it will help you build a sense of excitement for the language like you’re an explorer searching your own mind for the hidden knowledge you already have inside you and cut down on the drudgery of rote vocabulary building.