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Over the past few months, I’ve made it a goal of mine to learn Spanish. I took Spanish for 3 year in high school but was comically bad at it. With a ton of free time during quarantine, I took it upon myself to see whether there was a better way to learn.
In 3 months I’ve gone from a vocabulary of ~100 words, an understanding of present tense and no ability to convey myself verbally to being able to hold intermediate level conversations. Here is what I’ve found along the way while researching and fine tuning my process.
1. It’s all about frequency. Commit whatever amount of time you can each day and don’t miss. For me, 30 minutes was a realistic minimum but I’ll spend 60 minutes on most days. On super busy days I’ll only spend 10 minutes or so. As long as I don’t miss, then I’m happy.
2. Start with vocabulary and pronunciation first. Learn 600 of the most commonly used words and use flash cards with pronunciation. This provides a good base of vocab and allows you to link spelling with pronunciation. I did this using the @FluentForever App.
3. Speak the language with a native speaker early on. This helps you build confidence, listening comprehension, vocabulary and verbal fluency. You can book video calls with native speakers for grammar/conversation for as low as $5/hour on @italki . I did this 3x/week.
4. Find things to listen to or watch. My favorites have been Money Heist, Duolingo podcast and various childhood favorite cartoons dubbed in Spanish. This keeps things fun and exposes you to a lot of sentences constructions and vocabulary that native speakers would actually use.
Side note: You can find dual subtitle extensions for free on Google Chrome, allowing you to have subtitles in English and your target language simultaneously.
5. I’ve used a bunch of different apps but I’ve found @FluentForever to be the best. I will also use an app called Conjugación to drill out various conjugation too. A normal day consist of 30m Fluent and 30m Conjugación. On Italki days I will do a 1 hour lesson and 30m on Fluent.
6. There are tons of other great resources for learning how to “hack” language learning. If you’re interested, then check out blogs, podcasts and videos by @timferrisshow , @GabrielWyner and @irishpolyglot !
