I was half shocked, half amused reading all the stuff on the Internet about how learning Spanish is “easy” and how some guides teach you how to speak Spanish in 21 days. I always wanted to ask the people writing this kind of guides, exactly who they think they’re fooling. Spanish, just like any other language, takes time to learn. You’ll need constant exercise, you’ll need to focus on several parts of the language, such as the Spanish vocabulary, Spanish grammar and so forth. Of course, each person has a particular level of informational absorption that can help them (or hinder them if it’s low) in learning Spanish from scratch.
Obviously, it depends whether you want to learn Spanish for your next-week trip to Madrid, or if you intend to learn it for that job offer waiting for you there in 4 months. You may be able to grasp the basic language notions in a week, if you use one of those free language lessons that you can find online, but if you want to learn it properly and in-depth, you’ll be better off taking things slowly and chewing on what you learn instead of swallowing it as soon as you learn it.
During your first 2 weeks, take a child’s approach to learning Spanish. Learn what you would teach a child to know in English first: the colors, 0 to 20 numbers, helloes and goodbyes, seasons, months of the year, days of the week and all sorts of easy things that will help you get a taste of learning a new language as well as getting you accustomed to pronunciation and writing.
Once you’re at this point, go for a few grammar rules. Use a Spanish course if needed, or look up a Spanish grammar online lesson and try to find out differences and common points between Spanish and English (or your mother tongue if it’s not English of course). You’ll also work on your pronunciation, writing and understanding while going through the grammar rules.
Next up, assuming you already know the basic grammar rules and have a solid grip of the basic Spanish words, you’ll need to work hard to improve your vocabulary. Learning Spanish is just like playing with a jigsaw puzzle. You know that you want to get the bigger picture out of the small pieces, but before sticking them together you’ll need to start with the corners to give you a base (the “child” vocabulary mentioned above). After that, you need to understand the rules involved in sticking the pieces together (Spanish grammar) and finally, you will have to start picking the small pieces one by one and attach them to the forming picture (improve vocabulary).
Improving vocabulary in Spanish can be done in a number of ways. Probably the most common one is “relating objects”. That means that if you learn a new word from a specific category (fruits for example), you should expand your vocabulary in that particular category first, then move on to another related context.
For example, you learn the word “apple”, you move on to words like “pears”, “strawberries” and “peaches” then after you’re done with that distinct group of words, move on to bigger contexts in which you can use them such as “kitchen”, “farms” or “marketplace”. This will allow you to learn new words from the new bigger contexts and at the same time, re-use the words you had learnt in the smaller categories, which “fixes” them better in your memory.
I’m not saying this is THE only way of learning Spanish from scratch, but trust me, if you manage to follow these easy steps, you’ll soon have a solid and correct grasp of the Spanish language. There might be faster methods of learning a new language out there, but this old fashion step-by-step one practically restrains you from taking any huge leaps in the learning process and skipping some important stuff.
If you want to add some spice to your language learning process, you can try playing some word games, watching some Spanish shows on TV and last but not least, you could search the internet for some free language lessons online or even better, those free online “learn Spanish” videos that you can find all over the world wide web.
Posts Tagged ‘Spanish Vocabulary’
Learning Spanish From Scratch
December 27th, 2009Is It Really Easy To Learn Spanish?
October 20th, 2009Seeing 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
Spanish Learning Lesson Software – Interesting Facts & Tips! Learn About Interactive Language Learning Computer Programs
October 11th, 2009Spanish learning lesson software is an interesting innovative educational method for learning how speak and understand another language. Learning to speak and understand Spanish is a great way to broaden your language horizons and enhance your ability to communicate with others around the world. Want to learn more about how to speak and understand Spanish? Read the following review.
Some background
Spanish learning lesson software is considered as one of the most effective Spanish learning methods. How these technologies work? Most of them provide an interactive Spanish course, divided into lessons, which teach you step-by-step basic to advanced Spanish speaking and pronunciation skills.
If we research the Web we can quickly notice that many of these solutions provide the following: quick interactive lesson plans, image-based memorization games, and audio lessons.
Benefits
By now we clearly notice how this technology transforms our language learning process easier:
- Quickly develops the most common Spanish vocabulary required for a basic conversation.
- Effectively practices on pronouncing Spanish words and sentences correctly.
- Helps those who travel to Spanish speaking countries on communicating with the locals.
- Designed to be easy for both children and adults.
We could count other important advantages provided by these computer-based programs, simply because Spanish quickly becomes one of the world’s most popular languages.
Learning Spanish isn’t that difficult and thanks to these tools, learning Spanish becomes easier than ever, so any of us could easily learn how to speak it quit fast.
Conclusion
Spanish learning lesson software can help us acquire Spanish at relatively short time. Until today one of the most popular ways to learn Spanish was taking evening classes and using boring grammar guides. This technology offers a different approach.
By: Jason W.
