My experience learning the Spanish language

I have been learning Spanish for the better part of three years now; although my Spanish level or “Nivel” is far from advanced or perfect, I think I may have a thing or two when it comes to learning this language efficiently and quickly.

Well the truth is, I first took Spanish as my second language in high school, I was so immensely interested in it, that I decided to take it for my GCSEs and actually do the international and the worldwide iGCSE examination too. Spanish always came to me very easily, I was a natural in learning it; or that’s what everyone thought. I do not say this to gloat but my Spanish skills are one of my highest achievements and the truth is, being natural in a language doesn’t really exist, no one is natural in a foreign language they have never once heard or spoken. Truth is there are just tricks to learning languages, and well mine happen to be some really smart tricks.

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I did say I have been studying Spanish for three years, honestly if you exclude the high school years; I've only learnt Spanish for less than a year. My level is pretty much on upper B1 now, although I did my DELE exams for A2; after that I just continued classes and studied on my own. Well study is rather a lie; I practised my set of skills on my own.

In the first part of this article I'm going to recall my own method of learning this language and the next one I'm going to introduce a few of my favourite resources that helped me along this process.

My learning method

I had the easiest method to be honest, I divided the language into a few different parts. I started with learning the main vocabulary and the alphabet. This was the easy part, I learned the basics very fast, Spanish alphabet is quite easy, since it's so similar to the English language, and there are just a few differences. The vocabulary of everyday use was also quite easy, it included things like:

• Pleasantries (Hello, How are you, etc. )
• Describing your house and furniture (Hall, kitchen, room etc. )
• Describing your features (Tall, short, hair color, eye color etc. )
• Describing your family tree (Mother, father, siblings)
• Describing your hobbies (sports, art, music etc. )
• Being able to talk about your likes and dislikes
• Describing your education and plans
• Numbers (0-10)

I think that pretty much covers it, after I learned these few necessary stuff, I decided it was time for the next step which is mastering the grammar part of the language. Now I know grammar is the most boring part of learning a language and that is super true, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make it more bearable. I personally never liked the Spanish language grammar, there are too many rules and then too many exceptions to all the rules, so I was like I don’t get it, if you don’t want to follow the rules, why have any in the first place? Sadly I do not have an answer to that.

Anyways, I used this book called the “complete Spanish grammar book” written by Gilda Nissenberg. I honestly think it is an amazing book, it's more than amazing, it's the best grammar book there, and it has every crucial topic with a great amount of explanations and enough examples to make sure you learn the topic fully. I was completely satisfied with it; you can purchase the book from Amazon or any other well-known book store. Oh I almost forgot, it is really important for me for books to have answer sheets, since I'm learning the language by myself and don’t really have anyone to practice with. And this book contains a full answer sheet in the back. That is really great, because you can solve the problems and then check out whether you were right in the back.

(The complete grammar book cover)

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The most important and crucial grammar topics for beginners are:

• Nouns (Masculine or feminine? )
• Definite and indefinite articles (El, La) (Un, Una)
• Plural forms
• Regular verbs
• Irregular verbs
• Simple present tense
• Adjectives
• Simple adverbs
• Days of the week and numbers

I think this pretty much covers the basic grammar; this grammar should be enough to let you go to the next step. I think you guys could learn even more grammar if you feel like it. It will make your next step so much more diverse and interesting, but even if you dodn’t feel like it, you can always just stick around with this much and then come back for more later on.

Next up we have the reading comprehension part, you should start from really simple texts, I mean texts that are meant for primary 1 kids; really simple stories. You can find some in pages like : Agreenmouse and Spanish.cl, although the latter is a little bit harder, it is a great source of practice nonetheless.

Now I know what you guys are thinking, you are like what is the point of reading a story when you don’t understand anything? Well let me tell you; this way you become acquainted with Spanish writing, sentence structures and most importantly the usage of words and grammar; and then you can start to learn the meaning of every word and sentence.

I usually do this, at first I read the text once and try to guess the meaning, like an overall translation, and then I start with every sentence and underline what I don’t understand and find the meaning from the dictionary. I don’t really suggest using Google translate when you are a beginner because it's not really precise and their translations are very subjective. Spanishdict (Spanishdict ) is a pretty good and reliable source; they have had an outstanding improvement in their sources over the past years.

So after this I keep doing this over and over again, noting down every single new word I learn in the notebook and then making sentences with them, it is a very effective language learning method. It improves your reading, writing and overall understanding of the Spanish language.

Now we have covered aspects in every needed skill, except listening and speaking. Now my suggestions for these two skills are very simple. Watch a lot of YouTube videos, watch a lot of movies and do language exchange. See the thing about listening and speaking is that, they are interconnected, that means by learning one you learn about the other one too. Keeping this in mind, the most effective way to acquire these skills are by watching a lot of videos or movies in that language. I mean never ever underestimate the power of watching TV and learning a language. It is amazing; I have literally learnt my Spanish from TV, from watching a lot of Spanish shows. Now it would be even better if you have Spanish subtitles for everything you watch, this way you see the word and can search the meaning. Watching Spanish TV is the best way to learn the colloquial language of the people and the slang they use between themselves, you feel like a native after that.

In the next post I will mention some of my favourite YouTube channels and TV shows which are great for learning Spanish. So stay tuned.

Now well, I said something about language exchange programs. They are the most fun part of learning any language on your own. I was told about this by my high school Spanish teacher, she was such a huge influence on me and helped me through my years of learning Spanish. Language exchange is basically like two people who communicate with one another so each one of them can learn a new language. I always did it for English. I would teach the other person English and they would teach me Spanish. We basically just talked and conversed about different topics while correcting each other’s mistakes.

(A great depiction of language exchange)

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I did a language exchange with this lovely lady in KL, she was originally Spanish, from Madrid actually and she taught me so much. I loved the whole experience; she really did help me through my DELE examinations. We are in touch till today. So it's not only good for you because it's free of charge but it's also good because you get to meet new wonderful people.

Now I know what you guys are thinking, so what if you don’t know anyone in your city or like where are you supposed to find someone to converse with or basically communicate? Well that’s pretty simple too. Thanks to our good friend the internet, language exchange is as easy as ever. There are a ton of websites, one of the rather popular ones being My language exchange, there are about a hundred more, which I'm not going mention all.

This pretty much sums up my whole method of approaching the language. I hope I laid it out well enough, here’s a short recap.

• Learn the everyday basic vocabulary
• Learn the basic grammar
• Read short stories
• Record the new words you learn
• Use them in sentences and remember them
• Watch movies, shows or simple Spanish videos
• Do language exchange programs

Now that method is out of the picture, given I'm pretty sure I have explained everything there is to explain on it; let’s get to some of my favourite sources to learn the Spanish language in.

1) FluentU

Oh God, words cannot describe how much I love this website. It's so creative and innovative, that I fall in love with it a little bit more every day. Their website is the definition of innovate and interactive learning. Sending my love and most sincere regards to the FluentU team. Their motto is learning a language with video, or basically that’s their goal. I think it's a great tool, due to a number of reasons, first of all, it's a visual learning experience, so it is great for those of us that prefer to learn in a less text book ish way. Yes I just made up a whole new word deal with it.

Second of all, it is super fun to learn this way; it's a fun new method. Like there are all sorts of material, from YouTube videos, music videos, snippets of movies and TV shows, you name it. But apart from video learning, they have this mailing list that I am a part of and I absolutely adore. They send you emails from time to time with their featured articles. Now these featured articles are so good and interesting that I always find myself opening them anyway. I literally use it all the time. Every time I receive a new email from them I check out all their new articles.

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They have really cool styles, like Spanish slang, Spanish phrases to use on a first date, how to flirt in Spanish, how to find friends and a lot more. It's super cool. The mailing lists and the articles are free but you need to pay a subscription fee for full and unlimited access to the video content. They have monthly and yearly subscriptions and it's not only limited to Spanish language, there are other languages too.

2) Howlearnspanish

Now I learned about Andrew and his website a year ago, maybe more. It was around the time that I had started learning Spanish and I was going through Spanish sources. I didn’t find it very interesting or anything, I just saw that there was a mailing list and I was like I should sign up for it, maybe there is something useful in that, so I did. Now Andrew’s mailing list is one of my favourite sources. His emails mostly consist of him telling us about relatively cheap or completely free Spanish learning tools; he always includes the promotions, their codes and why this tool is good. I have actually learnt a lot from him and used many of his tips.

Now Andrew has published his second book, which is called the Telenovela method, this book can be purchased from Amazon or any other reputable website. His book is only about 10 Dollars which is such a small price to pay for such huge chunk of knowledge. You can learn more about the book and also check out his posts on his website.

3) Spanishpod101

Okay so I used to use this website way before, I was practising for my DELE exams and this proved to be an excellent source to listen to Spanish language conversations. Well they have podcasts from beginner to advanced, ranging from any topic, the cool thing about it is that, you learn how to speak in very different scenarios. They speak very clearly; repeat stuff a couple of times and over all the flow of the conversation is pretty great. The lessons are downloadable, which allows you to listen any time of the day even without an internet connection.

4) Duolingo

I love this application, it's such a motivating tool to learn a language, although I do think it's better for beginners, to get you started and on your feet and then after that you need to practice more professionally but it is a fun and easy way to start. I actually started learning my French language on this app recently and I did Spanish way before. You can download the app for free from the App store or the Play store and get started. You need to practice daily though, or else the owl isn’t gonna be happy. It works in a very simply way, you sign up, start your lessons either from complete beginner or any other level and then just like playing a game, you fill in the blanks, make sentences and get scores for it. The more levels you complete, the more progress you make.

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5) The BBC website

Again I haven’t used this source in a while, mostly because I don’t practice Spanish as much anymore; but I used to and I can say it offers a lot of diversity. There is this section that you can watch snippets of Spanish news. Watching the news is a very effective learning method, mostly because they are a lot of new vocabulary and news anchors talk very cohesively and properly. The BBC website also has worksheets you can use, crossword puzzles and video dramas. Like I said their variety is great, you just need to find what is right for you.

There are a lot of other tools, but I'm going to wrap it up here since it's getting late, it's almost 5 AM here and I'm officially a zombie. I hope you guys find this helpful, please don’t hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.

In the next post, I'm going to tell you guys about my favourite Spanish language TV shows and YouTube channels.

Cheers

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