Seeing how Spanish is one of the most important languages in the World in terms of numbers of speakers (around 350 million Spanish speakers world wide, making Spanish come fourth in a top of the most popular languages) it’s easily understandable why learning this language has become a priority for hundreds of thousand of people each year. Spanish is also considered the second most important international language, after English, placing further importance on its learning.

Since Spanish is the main language spoken in areas such as South and Central America (except Brazil and the Guyanas), Spain and Andorra in Europe, Equatorial Guinea, the Sahara desert and some parts of the United States and the surrounding areas, it’s safe to say that knowing even the slightest bits of Spanish can get you going in most parts of the World. Spanish is also a Latin language and by learning Spanish you’ll even be able to handle yourself in countries that share the same Latin background such as Italy, Romania, Portugal and so forth.

One of the tricky parts of learning Spanish is understanding and using accents. Spanish accents show the way words are stressed but they can sometimes change the entire meaning of the word. Take the word “esta” for example. Without an accent, esta means “this” but esta with a stressed last vowel means “it is”. This concept can be found in other languages (English included) but Spanish tends to have more of these accent-related word meaning changes.

Once you get a relatively solid hold on Spanish vocabulary and pronunciation, one good way to further your learning process is by coming into contact with Spanish through media, be it Spanish music or Spanish TV channels (if they are subtitled than it’s even better). When listening to Spanish music or when watching a Spanish show on TV, try to focus on “intercepting” the words you know and relate them to the context in which they are spoken. This way you’re both building vocabulary and correlating nouns to adjectives and verbs with adverbs with more ease. Remember that whenever we’re learning a new language it’s the passive concepts of listening and reading that are more useful at first. The active concepts of speaking and writing are less likely to produce correctly unless you have a good hold on the passives so they sort of build on one another. So don’t be disappointed if you won’t be able to pronounce or spell correctly even after a few weeks of learning Spanish. These things take time and it’s more important that you focus on getting familiar with the language through reading and listening first.




By: Michael Gabrikow