From the very beginning of your learning-Spanish journey, try your best to imitate native speakers. Try to imitate their pronunciations, their intonations, etc. This is not something that you should delay. In fact, this is one of the most important facets of learning any language.

Have you ever had someone come up to you and speak in what sounded like a foreign language. Maybe the person was asking for directions or some other information. And after the person rambled on for a while, you realized that the person was not, in fact, speaking a foreign language. He or she was actually speaking English. But his or her accent was so thick that you initially believed that the person was speaking a foreign language.

This can happen to you as a student of Spanish if you are not careful. You must make a purposeful effort to sound like native speakers. I know many Americans who claim that they speak Spanish fluently but their accents are awful. When I hear them speak, I say to myself “what a Gringo.” So I can only imagine what a native speaker of Spanish says about the person.

If you wait until you reach the intermediate level to start sounding like native speakers it will be too late to break the chains of habit. Make a deliberate effort to start now. It will begin to pay off when you start noticing how many native speakers of Spanish tell you how great your accent sounds.