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Why you should hear these and not say most of them
This lesson is asymmetric on purpose. Everything in it you need to understand, and rather little of it you should be producing yet, which is an unusual thing for a course to admit. Start with the listening problem, because it is the real one. By this point your reading is far ahead of your ears, and the reason is that written Spanish contains sounds that spoken Spanish deletes. You have learned the word cansado and will not recognise cansao. You know para and will hear pa. You know todo el día and will hear something that sounds like a single two-syllable word. Combine three or four of these in one sentence, at speed, with a muletilla in the middle, and a learner who reads Spanish comfortably can be left with nothing — which is exactly Alex's complaint, and it is not a failure of vocabulary. The fix is exposure to unscripted speech: podcasts made for natives rather than learners, radio phone-ins, television with the subtitles off, and above all conversations where you are allowed to say ¿puedes repetir? as often as you need. Now the production side, and the honest advice. A learner who deliberately drops final -d and says pa casa does not sound fluent; they sound like someone doing an impression, because the reductions only read as natural when everything around them is already native-speed. Worse, they are hard to control: you will apply them in the wrong register, to the wrong person, in writing. The muletillas are different and genuinely worth stealing — one or two of pues, bueno, o sea and ¿sabes? will make your speech sound much less like a recitation and will buy you a second to think, which is what they are for. tío is worth having too, once you have heard it used to you first. There is a social dimension it would be dishonest to skip. These forms are not neutral; in Spain, as everywhere, the way you speak is read as a claim about who you are. mogollón, flipar, en plan and qué chulo place a speaker as informal and fairly young. Constant reductions in a formal setting read as careless. An adult foreigner who arrives speaking nothing but colloquialisms is a slightly comic figure, and one who arrives speaking nothing but textbook Spanish is a slightly stiff one — the target is being able to move between the two on purpose, which is what lessons 99 and 101 are about. So the rule for now: understand all of it, and steal the fillers. Alex's last line is the right instinct, if a little overstated — hablaré así y escribiré como un notario. Nobody actually writes like a solicitor either, as lesson 101 will argue at some length.