Use Twitter, Learn Better

An insane amount of input in Spanish is your ticket to fluency and one of the simplest ways of going into an immersion overdrive is right under your nose: The social network! You heard that right. Total immersion means just that. Total. Absolute. What a waste, in that case, to still be using services like Twitter® and Facebook® in English when they are all available in Spanish without any compromise whatsoever in functionality! If your goal is to eventually speak the Spanish language like you were born with it, spare nothing. Not even your social life. Spanish must invade every aspect of your lifestyle no matter what.

When addiction is good

Make your social network work for you!
Photo credit: Tanja Scherm licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

By now you must have guessed where this is going. That the social network is addictive, is no secret today. We all have stories to tell if asked about the amount of time we have spent glued to our Facebook® and Twitter® feeds everyday. What we never realized, though, is how this addiction can be made to work for us! This addiction can be even more serious if you are a smartphone user and have your social networking accounts configured on your handheld.

So how much time do you think you spend on these sites as a daily average? If you have a computer at home, another at work, and a smartphone in between, all wired to suck you into your virtual world at your slightest fancy, chances are you are not spending less than an hour living Facebook® and/or Twitter® every day. Imagine the result if this window of opportunity were to be exploited to work for you! Imagine if spending more time on your social networks could mean learning more Spanish! Why detox when the addiction can itself work for you? Confused? Trust me, the idea is as simple as it gets.

Make them speak Spanish

In one of the earlier posts on easy Spanish immersion, we explored how switching your Operating System to the Spanish language works wonders for subtle input. On similar lines, your immersion environment will be more, well, immersive if you go beyond the OS switch to Spanish in as many things around you as practically possible. And one of the easiest means of achieving this state of Nirvana is by switching to Spanish on each of your social network accounts. Since, most of use Facebook® and Twitter® way more heavily than any other network, it pays to switch them to Spanish. So, “profile” becomes perfil, “message” becomes mensaje, “search” becomes buscar, and in the most unobtrusive way possible, Spanish takes over your virtual life before you even know it.

This sounds more difficult than it actually is. You might think it will get frustrating to have to look up the links and menu options in the dictionary every time you log into your accounts but trust me it won’t. Your brain is an amazing device and adapts to the new language incredibly fast. Since, the frequency with which you encounter the same options in Spanish is reasonable high, they will sink in and be a part of your regular vocabulary just like their English counterparts in no time. It worked for me. Why just settle with Facebook® or Twitter®? Go beserk, switch everything to Spanish...Google®, Gmail®, whatever you use regularly. Make Spanish a part of your online lifestyle.

Learning Spanish in 140 letters

Another very interesting method that I exploited successfully, thanks to Ramses of The Language Dojo, is to subscribe to Spanish-speakers on Facebook® or Twitter®. This works way better on Twitter® as subscribing to random persons’ tweets is completely unobtrusive because you don’t have to add them as friends like you have to on Facebook®. All you need to do is identify some prolific Spanish-language Twitter®-users and follow them. Then you can go a step further and add some of those whom these users follow, and so on. This way, you will have a constant stream of Spanish texts that you can read and practise translating to gain not only language proficiency but also an insight into the Hispanic culture as most tweets reflect Spanish as spoken in the streets. The most effective way is to follow users from the country whose dialect you intend to eventually master. That way you will be exposed to the target dialect of Spanish right from the start.

The biggest benefit of Twitter® in this context is what many would call its biggest limitation: Its 140-character limit on tweets. You don’t want the burn-out that hits you when you are dumped with a huge 500-letter text in an alien language forcing you to open the dictionary dozens of times. Short, crisp tweets mean you will be able to understand new words without always having to open the dictionary and the absorption is going to be more subtle and less frustrating. And throw in the bonus that comes in the form of interesting cultural insight these tiny texts could offer into the native users’ lives. I have often learned about important goings-on and current affairs in the Hispanic world exclusively through Twitter® and the irony is, I get a much better depth and feel of the news reading those short tweets than I do reading more detailed accounts offered by news sites!

Hope this article has given your thought process a new direction and inspired you further in your Spanish-acquisition endeavor. It just can’t get any lazier. Just take the plunge and let the never-ending stream of tweets condition your mind.