Advice on Learning Spanish

[Roamer]

So I'm in something of a rut with this. I've been trying to learn a little more Spanish each day but honestly I feel like I haven't been making much headway. My goal since the beginning of this year was to learn 3000 Spanish words. I've kept pretty well on trying to keep up with that but I've gotten to the point where I don't feel like it is making an impact. Like I'll learn 50 new words just to end up forgetting 20 of the ones I already knew. As if that wasn't annoying enough I am still totally lost any time I hear a Spanish speaker talk. I've gotten to where I can SORT OF read Spanish, but when it comes to hearing it spoken I am at a loss because the only thing I can do is translate each word and I get the feeling this is a bad way to learn a language.

 

Basically here is a rundown of my system:

 

Right Now I am learning the top 100 most spoken words in Spanish and I know about 90 of them by heart.

I do daily lessons on DuoLingo

I am familiar with BASIC sentence structure and conjugation as I learned that stuff in high school and it has stuck with me.

 

I USED to use Memrise but I got tired of its pickiness when it came to translation. For example it would give you a word that could have several different meanings and it would only accept the meaning assigned to it. DuoLingo takes various translations into account and is more accepting which is so much more preferable.

 

I know it isn't much, but I feel I'm ready to start trying something different. I'd appreciate any advice anyone could offer. Also if anyone speaks decent Spanish I'd be happy to hook up for some practice lessons. Or maybe someone has some advice on where I could go to do this (While on a budget).

[driscool]

It kind of depends on what level you are really at, but here's a few techniques.....

 

A translation a day: don't use Google translate, use a paper dictionary. For close reading skills, grammar acquisition, vocabulary consolidation. Take a short text- the second, or the last paragraph of a news item from eg https://elpais.com/ is a good place to start (the second is better than the first as Spanish  journalists have a tendency to show off their erudition and writerly talents in the first paragraph). Using your dictionary, or at most http://www.wordreference.com/ write your translation in English until you are satisfied that you have done the best translation you can do.

 

For grammar acquisition, listening: Dictation/dictogloss. Take a short section (up to about 1 minute) of one person speaking, with the possibilty of subtitles or a transcript. For example, there are some TED talks in Spanish here https://www.ted.com/playlists/518/ted_talks_en_español Listen all the way through a couple of times before you write anything. Take as many goes as you need, and try to write down exactly what you hear, pausing the recording to write. When you think you can't go any further, check what you wrote against the subtitles/transcript. Thats a dictation. A dictogloss is a similar thing, but this time you don't stop- listen to a short utterance- about three sentences, or less than 30 seconds. Listen to the whole section, and try to write down what you heard. Do this five times, adding to and correcting each time. Don't try to write and listen at the same time- try to hold the meaning in your mind. The again, check what you heard against the original. I recommend political speeches and college lectures for this, as the delivery is on topic, in formal language, and deliberate. Not always easy to find online (with the accurate subtitles/transcript), but try the news sites of Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina etc.

 

Speaking: Record yourself. If your phone doesn't have a voice recorder you can download an APP.  Some techniques- Pick a topic, anything will do, for example your fitness goals/plan. Turn on the recorder and start speaking. Stop when you run out of things to say. Listen back, and try to think about how you'd explain things differently a second time. Listen again- what main points did you make? Record yourself again, but this time give yourself a time limit, say 10 seconds or 10% less than the first time, but with the task that you have to include all of the major information you gave the first time around. Repeat until bored. DON"T try to memorise a set script.

 

Pronunciation: Text to speech, voice search. Can you get get google in Spanish to understand what you are saying? If google understands you, a human should. 

Also, repeat short, memorable phrases trying to match the intonation you hear from TV ads, songs etc

 

[Roamer]

On 8/13/2017 at 10:02 PM, driscool said:

It kind of depends on what level you are really at, but here's a few techniques.....

 

A translation a day: don't use Google translate, use a paper dictionary. For close reading skills, grammar acquisition, vocabulary consolidation. Take a short text- the second, or the last paragraph of a news item from eg https://elpais.com/ is a good place to start (the second is better than the first as Spanish  journalists have a tendency to show off their erudition and writerly talents in the first paragraph). Using your dictionary, or at most http://www.wordreference.com/ write your translation in English until you are satisfied that you have done the best translation you can do.

 

For grammar acquisition, listening: Dictation/dictogloss. Take a short section (up to about 1 minute) of one person speaking, with the possibilty of subtitles or a transcript. For example, there are some TED talks in Spanish here https://www.ted.com/playlists/518/ted_talks_en_español Listen all the way through a couple of times before you write anything. Take as many goes as you need, and try to write down exactly what you hear, pausing the recording to write. When you think you can't go any further, check what you wrote against the subtitles/transcript. Thats a dictation. A dictogloss is a similar thing, but this time you don't stop- listen to a short utterance- about three sentences, or less than 30 seconds. Listen to the whole section, and try to write down what you heard. Do this five times, adding to and correcting each time. Don't try to write and listen at the same time- try to hold the meaning in your mind. The again, check what you heard against the original. I recommend political speeches and college lectures for this, as the delivery is on topic, in formal language, and deliberate. Not always easy to find online (with the accurate subtitles/transcript), but try the news sites of Spain, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina etc.

 

Speaking: Record yourself. If your phone doesn't have a voice recorder you can download an APP.  Some techniques- Pick a topic, anything will do, for example your fitness goals/plan. Turn on the recorder and start speaking. Stop when you run out of things to say. Listen back, and try to think about how you'd explain things differently a second time. Listen again- what main points did you make? Record yourself again, but this time give yourself a time limit, say 10 seconds or 10% less than the first time, but with the task that you have to include all of the major information you gave the first time around. Repeat until bored. DON"T try to memorise a set script.

 

Pronunciation: Text to speech, voice search. Can you get get google in Spanish to understand what you are saying? If google understands you, a human should. 

Also, repeat short, memorable phrases trying to match the intonation you hear from TV ads, songs etc

 

 

Wow, that's great advice! I think I might start doing some of that as best I can! Thank you!

 

Anybody have any other suggestions?

[Sciread77]

Do you have anyone you can practice conversation with?  I'm learning French, and it helps tremendously that I have several relatives from France that I can converse with.  The more people you have (and the more important/interesting those people are to you) the better you'll begin to remember.  My wife and kids are also learning with me, so everyone keeps each other on their toes. That's made this far more successful and efficient than my years in Spanish.

[Roamer]

15 hours ago, Sciread77 said:

Do you have anyone you can practice conversation with?  I'm learning French, and it helps tremendously that I have several relatives from France that I can converse with.  The more people you have (and the more important/interesting those people are to you) the better you'll begin to remember.  My wife and kids are also learning with me, so everyone keeps each other on their toes. That's made this far more successful and efficient than my years in Spanish.

 

I don't, in fact, I am the only person I know who is trying to learn Spanish. There are communities in my town that have native Spanish speakers I considered going and practicing with, but I wasn't sure if they'd take me seriously or think I was mocking their language or something. It's a silly fear, in fact it is practically an excuse, but it is how I feel. I'm always down to practice learning with anyone, especially someone else in the process or learning it though.

[Sciread77]

That can make it hard.  I'm lucky that my wife enjoys learning and speaking languages too, and that we've been in the position to develop a social circle that includes speakers of other languages.  Do you know any of the native Spanish speakers?  Most Spanish speakers I know are excited when someone wants to learn their language.

 

One thing we've both learned is that the fear you're talking about is one of the biggest barriers adults have when learning other languages.  I'm only marginally comfortable speaking in languages other than English myself outside of basic interactions.  I'm not sure that my kids actually know the difference between French and English yet, so they fire it off all the time without a second thought.

 

I've always been inspired by my college roommate, a transfer student from Chile named Sebastian.  He was fearless in his practice of English, and joked along with us about his mistakes.  Like the time he started dropping F-bombs after he watched Goodfellas with me, and then realized later that it's not appropriate language for polite conversation lol.  

[Team 7]

What helped me is an old discarded high school textbook that I found to get the basics. It was a copy of the actual book I had used in high school back when I just memorized for the tests and never truly learned (I could kick myself in retrospect). The book covered Spanish 1 and 2. I read it cover to cover and did the exercises. It may sound boring, but I looked at it as a means to an end: I WANTED to learn Spanish.

 

Once I did this, I started reading fiction books written in Spanish. I am currently reading Stephen King's "It" in Spanish. I read the Twilight books in Spanish. There are quite a few books out there translated to Spanish. All the while I had a Spanish-English dictionary at my side, and the internet for audio versions of words. And in the evening when things quieted down, I'd watch Spanish TV shows.

 

And, I also bought a book that has all the "dirty words" in Spanish. It also has common conversation verbiage. It's good to know some common lingo.

 

I'm currently attempting to use the same steps above to get a better handle on Mandarin. I had an ex that I learned a bit from while we were in college, but it was mainly when she said a word here or there in Mandarin. The books are a little harder to find though...

[JulesVerne]

I'll give you some of the advice I've used since I'm learning french and what worked when I was learning english (I'm a native spanish speaker, ha). Do watch the ted talks in english that were recommended above, watch them with spanish subtitles so you can get a better understanding of pronuntiation. It can be difficult because a lot of words and grammar structures pop-up very fast in speech, but whatever you don't understand, wait 'till the end to look up. Repetition is key, watch them multiple times, I did this with slam poetry in english with no subtitles, I understood half the things people said, but after the twentieth time, I got every word of it, hehe.

If you don't have anyone to make conversation with, try writting! its a conversation, but with yourself, you will make a lot of mistakes, but you would also make them in speech and no one would have the time to correct you with everything. The hardest thing for me in french is conjugation, and that's also something that happens with Spanish. Don't try and learn all the conjugation forms for all the verb tenses in all the personal pronouns (yo como, tú comerás, él comió, ellos comían). Start with the present and past tense and only in first person singular (Yo).  So for example, write down a brief presentation of yourself, that should be in present tense, very simple. Then, write whatever you did today, like a diary, or a synopsis of the last movie you watched. If it's too complicated, write it in english and then translate it to spanish, try to avoid difficult structures so that it's not too hard to translate for you. You will most likely only use the first person in singular and maybe the third person.

 

Right now, in french I only know present, one form of past tense and one form of future tense, so I guess you could do the same for spanish.
Lastly, nothing will substitute a foreing language program, right now there are plenty of schools and private tutors doing remote classes, so I think if you want to be fluent or "defend yourself" in a spanish speaking country, you should conisder a course, it will take more time, but you will learn much more and in an efficient way, and as long as you practice you will never forget. I became fluent in english just by watching movies and spending all my time in the internet, so that can't be too hard for you, did you know that spanish is the second most spoken language of the internet?

[Keladris]

I'll be honest, I haven't read all of the above, but I highly recommend Language Transfer: https://www.languagetransfer.org/  It got me speaking and understanding the language much more quickly than other methods.

The other really important thing is to get talking as soon as you can. There are various ways to chat to people online, language exchange type things, just give it a google. I've also recently found a great teacher in Buenos Aires who is giving me lessons online. It's worked out fairly cheap given the exchange rate. I found her on tusclases: https://www.tusclases.com/

I do really like duolingo too, and pair them with the duolingo podcasts which are fab. It's really important to immerse yourself in the language as much as a you can.

[Sciread77]

1 hour ago, Keladris said:

I'll be honest, I haven't read all of the above, but I highly recommend Language Transfer: https://www.languagetransfer.org/  It got me speaking and understanding the language much more quickly than other methods.

The other really important thing is to get talking as soon as you can. There are various ways to chat to people online, language exchange type things, just give it a google. I've also recently found a great teacher in Buenos Aires who is giving me lessons online. It's worked out fairly cheap given the exchange rate. I found her on tusclases: https://www.tusclases.com/

I do really like duolingo too, and pair them with the duolingo podcasts which are fab. It's really important to immerse yourself in the language as much as a you can.

I’m going to check that out. 
 

I will say that since posting this in 2017 my Spanish has improved leaps and bounds. But that was largely due to getting a job in which my boss and half my coworkers are native Spanish speakers and a substantial amount of the work is in Spanish as well. I can read it pretty well now and speak well enough to get by and read Harry Potter. That’s a pretty stressful way of doing it, though. 
 

Duolingo is fun. It’s not really very efficient but as far as games go it’s pretty supportive of language learning. 

[Keladris]

Didn't realise the original post was 2017! That's awesome you improved so much. Definitely think using hte language is the most important thing  My partner is Argentine so I am forced to used my Spanish when we see his family!

[Sciread77]

10 hours ago, Keladris said:

Didn't realise the original post was 2017! That's awesome you improved so much. Definitely think using hte language is the most important thing  My partner is Argentine so I am forced to used my Spanish when we see his family!

That’s really cool. We have friends who are speakers and my wife speaks Spanish reasonably well after 6 years of formal study but it’s still not my default.

 

My job involves a ton of reading and some talking when the native speakers are out of the office. Of course, it’s mostly business relationships and topics. I’m glad I’ve improved but like I said, there are a lot less stressful ways of practicing and learning lol. 

I feel like a personal connection would probably make it better for the long run. 

 

[Ingagr]

Hi! Spanish is my natural language, so if you want/need some practice, I'm offering as "sparring guy".

 

¡Nos vemos, que te vaya bien!