In this lesson we will speak about some of the things that will help you learn Spanish more effectively.
If you are learning Spanish, your goal may be one, some or all of the following:
• Understanding written Spanish.
• Understanding spoken Spanish.
• Writing correctly in Spanish.
• Speaking correctly in Spanish.
How do you achieve these goals? How can you learn Spanish effectively?
There are different ways in which you can practice:
• Reading any kind of Spanish text: books, magazines, blogs, emails, messages on social media…
• Listening to radio or podcast, or watching films, series, YouTube videos…
• Writing in Spanish: emails, letters, social media messages or posts, blog posts…
• Speaking with native speakers of Spanish or other learners, or recording digital messages or videos…
Any of these activities will impact not only the most directly related skill, but also all the others.
For example, reading Spanish texts will help you improve your understanding of written Spanish. But it will also affect your oral comprehension skills, your writing skills and your speaking skills.
When you read in Spanish, you are acquiring new vocabulary and also consolidating vocabulary you have learned before. You are also getting exposed to full messages. These may be easier to understand than their spoken version, but they will help you train yourself to understand spoken messages anyway.
Some of the messages you read will also become part of the reservoir repertoire of phrases that you will be able to use when writing or speaking yourself. And, when you have read enough sentences, you may start to internalize the structures on which they are built, and you will be able to create original sentences as needed.
And the same goes for listening to spoken Spanish: It will positively affect your understanding of both spoken and written Spanish, as well as your capacity to write and speak in Spanish.
Hidden Benefits and Limitations
Sometimes, the benefits are not self evident. For example, some learners for whom oral comprehension is the most important goal, don’t realize that, especially at the lower levels, your capacity to understand spoken Spanish improves dramatically when you work on your speaking skills. The reason is that you are more likely to understand something that you could have said yourself than something that you couldn’t. So you will improve your Spanish listening comprehension skills more effectively if you dedicate some time to improve your speaking skills.
And sometimes it is the limitations of a given approach that go unnoticed.
Some Spanish learners want to spend all their study time on a unique practice task. For example, many students want to spend all their time watching videos in Spanish. Others just want to read.
I mentioned above that, when you have been reading or listening to Spanish for a while, you may start to internalize the structures on which the language is built. This is what happened when you learnt your native language.
When children have been exposed to their parents language for a while, they first start to imitate sounds, then words, and then short phrases. However, very soon, they also start to instinctively pick up the patterns that people around them follow to build their messages.
If you’ve had the opportunity to be around children when they were learning to speak, you may have noticed that children sometimes use incorrect words and sentences as a result of following a grammar rule for which there is an exception that they don’t know yet.
This is very easy to observe in the case of native Spanish children, because they use irregular verbs as if they were regular at the beginning. This means that they are using words that they have actually never heard before. But they are building them after the pattern they have observed.
The truth is that children are very good at this and they are soon capable of internationalizing not only the standard grammar rules, but also the exceptions.
However, adults are not as good as children at getting patterns right when learning a second language. One of the reasons being that the grammar of our native language interferes with those patterns.
This is why, apart from the four basic—and indispensable—activities I have mentioned (reading, listening, writing and speaking) we, adults, benefit immensely from engaging in the conscious study of the patterns that rule Spanish.
How Important Is Grammar?
The problem is that the standard name for that system of patterns is grammar. And grammar has gotten a bad reputation because of how it has been approached in some learning methods, so many adults are put back when they hear the word. So we will keep speaking about patterns.
Some people believe that adults can still learn a new language in the same way that they learned their native language as children. I believe that it is possible, but not for every adult.
If, for example, 100 people are given guitars, a few of them will learn to play beautifully just by listening to their favorite tunes and experimenting with the instrument. However, most of them will have a better opportunity to learn how to play a guitar, even at a mediocre level, if they have access to a book, a website or a teacher who not only shows them the right playing technique, but also helps them get a basic understanding of music language.
In the same way, most adults learn to speak Spanish faster and more effectively when they have access to resources that help them consciously study the patterns that the Spanish language follows.
I have seen this very clearly when living abroad, in Germany and Japan. I’ve met many foreigners that were consciously learning the local language through language lessons or with the help of other resources. And I have also met foreigners that had lived in that country for a long time, but had never studied the language actively because they didn’t need it for their job. Most of the later could only speak a very poor version of the language that couldn’t even be called “broken German” or “broken Japanese”. Only a few of them had been able to pick up a decent level of the language.
This is because only some adults are able to pick up the patterns unconsciously the way they did with their native language when they were kids.
Time to Learn Spanish More Effectively
If your goal is to learn Spanish, and even if your main goal is only one of the skills—reading comprehension, listening comprehension, written expression or oral expression—you shouldn’t skip any of these types of activities:
• reading
• listening
• writing
• speaking
• pattern study
I have been working as a Spanish instructor for almost 20 years now. During my live online lessons, I mostly work with my students on speaking and listening comprehension. But my self study online resources at Light On Spanish focus on the comprehension of the Spanish language patterns.
Learning to distinguish the different patterns when it comes to the use of SER and ESTAR, the different past tenses or the subjunctive mood, among other difficult aspects, is the best way to ensure that you will be able to express in a correct and fluent way in Spanish.
I have been able to prove this after working with hundred of Spanish learners.
If you are not speaking Spanish as fluently and accurately as you would like, you would probably benefit from our Light On Spanish Membership program. Check it out.