What Everyone Ought to Know About Learning Spanish

by David Leigh

Despite the fact that when I was a kid we used to learn French and German at school I can hardly remember a word of either, but when my parents bought a holiday apartment in Spain when in my early twenties I started to revive my interest in languages.

And so my first brush with Spanish came through the Accelerated Learning series, where a combination of putting yourself it the right mindset, listening to lessons that were repeated in different ways, often accompanied by baroque music, as well as reading and written work all combined to reinforce each lesson and theoretically at the end of 20 days, spending 30 minutes to an hour, you would emerge as a Spanish speaker.

It didn't matter that I never made it to the end of the course the first time I tried it, but it did ground me in some basic Spanish. Not enough to hold any kind of conversation, but enough to be able to make sense of a menu or order a beer. And that's a start!

Although I didn't manage to complete the course that first time - I just couldn't dedicate myself everyday having got home from work and found that sometimes I needed to go over the lessons again - I did return to it later and started from the very beginning.

While this meant that I was repeating the lessons, it also had a big advantage. One of the prime ways that a language sticks is repetition, and by redoing the lessons I was helping to reinforce the language in my head. Of course it seemed simpler this time, but simpler is no bad thing - simpler means the learning process is happening.

Again I failed to get to the end of the course, but my Spanish was improving bit by bit. I could now direct a taxi driver in Spanish, basic but good enough to get to my destination, and that is the whole point of learning a language - the ability to communicate.

By reading the newspaper, dictionary in hand my vocabulary increased, but leaning a language isn't about learning individual words, it's about how your target language strings those words together to make sense of a whole. That means having phrases inside your head, perhaps not initially at the tip of your tongue to start with, but reachable with a bit of effort.

And that doesn't mean concentrating on grammar all the time - learning a language is hard enough as it is without studying grammar all the time. It can help you clarify things sometimes, but the point of learning a language, at least for me, isn't in the learning but in the language - what I mean is that really I never wanted to learn Spanish at all, I wanted to speak and understand it.

If you're learning Spanish today you're spoilt for choice. In my day I had to rely upon cassettes, but now you can load up lessons on your iPod or mp3 player and away you go - on the way to work, on the bus or a plane, you get real portability. One of the great products around at the moment is Rocket Spanish which takes advantage of this kind of technology as well as software that helps you learn with visual clues as well as audio and by engaging your mind and immersing you in the language helps you to learn Spanish quickly, efficiently and really internalise it so that you can produce it when you need.

David has now lived in Spain for more than 5 years and recommends Rocket Spanish for fast and efficient learning of the Spanish language.