subject: Learning Spanish Like Crazy [print this page] If you want to learn a language quickly and inexpensively, you have picked the right language. With the exception of English, Spanish is spoken more than any other language in the U.S. You will have plenty of opportunities to practice your Spanish with native speakers of Spanish and even Americans that learned Spanish as their first language.
The ability to speak Spanish also opens many career or business opportunities. As an attorney, the ability to speak Spanish has enabled me to represent many clients simply because I spoke their language.
Of course, if you live in certain cities or states you will have more opportunities to practice your Spanish.
My objective is to give you a multitude of tips and techniques to help you speed up your learning of Spanish. I also want to reveal a number of things that you can do to make your learning experience as inexpensive as possible.
If you really want to learn Spanish, you need to immerse yourself in the language and the culture. Do you know why you learned English so easily? It's not just because you were a child when you embarked on your study of the English language. It's mainly because you were immersed in it. As a child you heard English 24 hours a day and 7 days a week.
If you could hear and speak Spanish 24 hours a day and 7 days a week you would also learn Spanish incredibly fast. Although it may be difficult for you to hear and speak Spanish 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, there are things you can do to help immerse yourself in the language.
Instead of listening to your favorite music station when you're driving in your car, play a Spanish instructional CD. Of course, if your favorite music station happens to be a Salsa or Merengue radio station, you can listen to the Spanish lessons CD some other time.
Develop the Right Habits
This is probably the most important advice that I can give you about learning Spanish or any other foreign language. More than anything else, your habits will determine how quickly you learn Spanish. In fact, your habits will determine if you actually learn the language or not.
Of course it helps if you have a language learning aptitude. Unfortunately, I didn't have a language learning aptitude. In fact, I couldn't speak English until I was four years old despite the fact that English was my first language and the only language spoken in my home as a child. However, my desire to learn Spanish was strong enough for me to develop the necessary habits for learning Spanish.
If you develop and cultivate these habits, you will learn Spanish extremely fast.
Learn Spanish the Same Way that You Learned English
This may come as a shock to you, but in the high schools and colleges in the U.S., the method that they are using to teach Spanish is all wrong.
If you want to learn Spanish, you must learn it the same way that you learned English. Let me ask you a question. Which did you learn first: How to speak English or how to read and write English? Of course you learned how to speak it first.
Then why are they teaching the students in the high schools and colleges to read and write Spanish first? That's because they don't expect the students to ever be able to speak Spanish. And that's exactly what happens. Students take several years of Spanish, graduate, and cannot even speak Spanish.
There's another problem with learning to read and write Spanish before you learn to speak it. By default, you subconsciously learn how to pronounce the Spanish words the way you would pronounce them in English.
Relate to What You Already Know
Make Use of On-Line Resources
There are a number of on-line resources that can assist you in learning Spanish. Many of them are free.
Since you are studying Spanish you would try to meet someone at My Language Exchange that's a native speaker of Spanish and is trying to learn English. You could become pen pals with the person. But I recommend that you become more than just pen pals. As I mentioned earlier, the only way that you can learn how to speak Spanish is by actually speaking it.
Become an Imitator
From the very beginning of your learning-Spanish journey, try your best to imitate native speakers. Try to imitate their pronunciations, their intonations, etc. This is not something that you should delay. In fact, this is one of the most important facets of learning any language.
Have you ever had someone come up to you and speak in what sounded like a foreign language? Maybe the person was asking for directions or some other information. And after the person rambled on for a while, you realized that the person was not, in fact, speaking a foreign language. He or she was actually speaking English. But his or her accent was so thick that you initially believed that the person was speaking a foreign language.
This can happen to you as a student of Spanish if you are not careful. You must make a purposeful effort to sound like native speakers. I know many Americans who claim that they speak Spanish fluently but their accents are awful.
If you wait until you reach the intermediate level to start sounding like native speakers it will be too late to break the chains of habit. Make a deliberate effort to start now. It will begin to pay off when you start noticing how many native speakers of Spanish tell you how great your accent sounds.
Practice Makes Perfect
Practice Makes Perfect is more than just a saying. It's a language-learning reality. When we were children we were completely unaware of the emotion called "embarrassment."
If you stay focused you will surely accomplish your goal of speaking Spanish proficiently or fluently. And you have total control over whether you reach that goal in a year or two or a decade or two. I hope that the techniques that I have outlined in this report will enable you to accomplish your goal as quickly as you desire.
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