Like many of you, I was bad at Spanish in school. Also like many of you, I thought learning a foreign language was too difficult and frustrating. I took two full years of Spanish in high school and another year in college and at the end, had very little to show for it. It was maddening. Oh sure, I could generally get the gist of news articles with the help of a dictionary and find out where the toilet was anywhere in the spanish-speaking world, but when it came to actually communicating verbally with native spanish speakers, my three years of Spanish classes left me completely unprepared. Naturally, I gave up, for a while.
As it turns out, I wasn't bad at learning languages, I was just going about it the wrong way. Language classes in school are by far the worst way to learn a language. In fact, I've never met anybody who learned to truly speak a foreign language solely from language classes. For starters, they just don't give you enough face-time with the language. In college, Spanish class met three days per week for an hour each. Of that class time, probably only 15 or 20 minutes at most were really spent immersed in the language. The rest was wasted on memorizing esoteric vocabulary and conjugating verbs. Unfortunately, that is not how human beings learn languages. Humans learn by hearing and speaking, not through memorization. Knowing how to conjugate regular -ar verbs is obviously important and something you will have to learn eventually, but it won't help you in a conversation because you don't have time to stop and think about it if you don't want to frustrate your conversation partner.
My final motivation for really learning Spanish was when I found out I would be living and studying in Spain for a semester. Cognizant of my previous experiences trying to learn Spanish but also knowing the value of speaking the native tongue when living in a foreign land, I did a lot of research on effective techniques to learn languages quickly and easily. As it turns out, there is no short-cut. There is simply no way around the fact that you have to spend lots of time reading, writing, listening, and speaking the language in order to be able to speak it with a reasonable level of fluency. The good news is if you have the discipline to study every day, it doesn't take long and the learning itself is actually quite easy. I started studying one hour per day using a combination of audio programs with speaking drills, grammar workbooks with writing drills, and vocabulary lists. When I stepped off the plane onto Spanish soil five months later, I hit the ground running. Of course I wasn't fluent yet, but I had no trouble communicating with the natives about even complex topics and it only took a few weeks of daily practice in-country to reach something approaching functional fluency in the language. If I can do it, so can you.
Want to
learn to speak spanish but don't know where to being? Check out my
beginner Spanish guide.
