How Not to Learn Spanish
So what’s the best way to learn Spanish? Some words of advice from one who learned it the worst way.
I learned, or rather studied Spanish, in college. I was so interested in this at the time that I majored in Latin American Studies so I could take as many Spanish courses as possible and fit in some cultural studies as well.
The Spanish department at my school was at that time hopelessly antiquated and taught basically grammar, supplemented with a little audio work in the language lab. Although the graduate student teaching assistants were mostly native speakers, English was the primary means of communication in the classroom. I quickly sensed I was getting nowhere fast with speaking and understanding, even though I was making all A’s.
Fortunately, I was really determined. I accepted an offer of free tutoring from a similarly obsessed Spanish major, and we would meet weekly to converse, dictionaries in hand and a strict “no-English” rule in force. Together we attended every Spanish film or cultural event that passed through the Bay Area. We ate in Mexican and Spanish restaurants. We perused exhibits of Hispanic art. We listened to South American charango music and saw flamenco performances. We made flash cards and drilled verbs. We spent hours in the language lab listening to historical recorded speeches by Fidel Castro, Lazaro Cardenas, and others. And we did eventually manage to speak and understand Spanish. But it was unnecessarily torturous (apart from the cultural stuff, which we loved) and I am convinced that the initial grammatical approach handicapped me to this day, particularly with regard to comprehension. I can speak Spanish quite well, but I still miss a lot of what others are saying, especially under suboptimal conditions, such as the presence of lots of background noise (a given in Mexico), or having more than one person talking at a time (like at parties).
Towards the end of my undergraduate career, I decided to audit a French class. Same school, even the same building probably. But the French department was light years ahead of the Spanish department, even though their basic text was equally crappy and overpriced. Their secret? They allowed only French spoken in the classroom. Madame, the teacher, spoke exclusively French, and she spoke plenty of it, keeping up a constant patter throughout the class hour. If you, the student, wished to ask leave to go to the toilet, or inquire when the next quiz was going to be, you had to do it in French. It was amazingly effective, miraculous, really. I learned more French in those 10 weeks than I’d done in two years of Spanish, and this despite the fact that I almost never had time to do the homework. Although I never pursued it that much and therefore lack vocabulary, I can follow a French movie almost as well as a Spanish one, and once after spending three weeks in Paris I found I was understanding maybe 75% of what I heard. I remain deeply impressed by the difference in these two learning experiences.
The moral: I would humbly recommend that you seek out what is called the “natural approach” in your language studies, and avoid old-fashioned grammar like the plague. If going to live classes, insist upon ones where only Spanish is spoken. If using audio or video material, look for similar qualities. You’ll gain a far better grasp of the language, a whole lot faster, and it’ll be more fun, too.