My Tryst With Spanish: What Worked And What Didn’t

Do you know how many languages are spoken in India? Well over a hundred! Needless to say, most Indians are bilingual, or even trilingual. And yet when it comes to foreign languages, we mostly wind up with the short end of the stick. So how did I manage to not only choose Spanish but also follow through on that choice? This is my story of how I began my journey with Spanish? There are countless stories of how people around the world have achieved their big and small language learning dreams; this one is mine. I wouldn’t stake a claim to fame for this feat but it certainly does feel good to be able to speak a foreign language finally!

Yes, there are schools and institutions in India that teach foreign languages but they’re far and few in between and careers around language are far out-shined by more traditional choices like medicine, engineering, and law. Of all that do exist, Spanish seems to fare the worst. Most foreign language enthusiasts gun for the likes of French and Mandarin and that’s despite the heavy recent influx of Latin pop on the country’s music scene.

The beginning

Language learning can get boring sooner than you think
Photo credit: velkr0 licensed CC BY 2.0

I wasn’t exposed to any language other than English until well into my high school years. Foreign language was neither my fascination, nor my goal. The first time I was exposed to a foreign language was when I happened to pick up a book on French grammar while browsing at a second-hand bookstore. This is what got me interested and before I knew it, I was actually learning my first foreign language – cramming verb tables and writing exercises.

Unfortunately, my French affair didn’t last much because another of my hobbies, shortwave radio, introduced me to Deutsche Welle. That’s Germany’s official radio station and back then, they were running a radio course on learning the German language. It was called “Deutsche – Warum Nicht?” I wrote to them for a transcript of their course and they responded by shipping me a set of four incredibly exhaustive German learning books in a neat package – all for free! This didn’t bode too well for my French as I soon got busy learning German instead. Call me impatient but language learning got immensely boring to me very quickly.

Goes without saying, I didn’t last very long with German either. Then after graduating high school, I once ran into Shakira’s “Suerte.” This sounded quite exotic – what language was that! That’s how my tryst with Spanish began. Soon I went berserk buying myself well over a dozen Spanish learning books and resources so I could have everything I need to nail the language. Guess what, I dropped the idea in six months!

Was I not meant for foreign languages?

Then I had an epiphany one day while reading through some blogs. I don’t remember which blog in particular but I discovered that I was the reason for my own failure! The very reason I was failing was that I was “over-preparing” myself.

In simpler terms, amassing a mountain of books and CDs is the worst possible way to approach learning anything. While it may feel fun in the beginning, that many options can and do overwhelm you very quickly. And once overwhelmed, it’s not difficult to get demotivated. So this was when I made three key decisions that changed my Spanish learning landscape forever. Let’s see what those three gamechanging ideas were.

1. Minimize your resources

You don’t need a mountain of resources to get started!
Photo credit: Ken Mayer licensed CC BY 2.0

This might look like something right in the face of conventional wisdom that harps, the more resources you have, the better your chances at success. But trust me, resources don’t teach you – you do. You don’t need five grammar books to teach you the same grammar. One is enough. You don’t need two dictionaries to learn words. One is enough. You certainly don’t need a dozen phrasebooks and CDs. That’s overkill.

All you need is one very rudimentary grammar book, an equally basic Spanish-English dictionary, and a children’s story book in Spanish. I would shy away from fat and exhaustive tomes at this stage. You’re just trying to learn Spanish and get conversational, not doing a research thesis on it.

2. Always Spanish

You can’t expect to get conversational in a language until you let it grow on you. And it won’t grow on you unless you start engaging with it – all the time. Bring Spanish into every aspect of your daily life to the maximum extent possible. Listen to only Spanish music. Read only Spanish text, be it books, blogs, news, magazines, etc. Watch only Spanish shows. Listen to only Spanish podcasts or radio. It might seem frustrating at first but give it time and it will start showing results sooner than you thought.

Your goal should be to reach a stage where you’re living and breathing Spanish. Keep a dictionary handy to look up words every now and then. Don’t do any grammar at this stage. Make sure you learn and memorize words you pick using mnemonics, word-association, and flashcards. Learn them in context and not in isolation.

3. No grammar did you say?

Develop an ear for Spanish before you even consider its grammar
Photo credit: Paul Sableman licensed CC BY 2.0

I learned this the hard way but you don’t have to. Save grammar for later. It’s not completely irrelevant but is certainly not going to be much help until you have developed an “ear for Spanish.” You should go berserk exposing yourself to as much Spanish as you can. It’s never too much. You will notice a steady fall in the number of times you’re having to hit the dictionary.

Learn to imitate the speakers. I used to do that a lot which is how I managed to develop a credible American accent sitting at home doing just this! This is the stage where you just focus on absorbing the words and the patterns. These patterns will help you reproduce Spanish effortlessly at a later time. Only once you’re confident about being able to understand most of what you hear or read, should you start with grammar. Grammar should only be a tool to help you understand how the patterns form and consolidate your understanding of Spanish so you could start articulating more complex thoughts on your own.

4. Be inventive with words

Yes, I said you ought to have a good Spanish-English dictionary at hand and you probably do. But you’re using it the wrong way in all likelihood. Ever tried to memorize Spanish words list after list hoping to one day have the entire dictionary on the tip of your tongue and expected for it to somehow make you as verbose in the language as a native speaker if not more? I wager you have. And I also wager the endeavor fell flat on its face. Surprised? Well, there are just too many reasons for a project this quixotic to fail but I’ll talk about the biggest ones here.

First of all, you didn’t memorize words off of a dictionary when you started speaking your native language. And there’s no reason why you should have to with your second. You see, in order to express yourself, you need the words to flow out of you as naturally as possible. You ought to “think” in Spanish. And learning words in isolation doesn’t help that cause. Words memorized off a list continue to remain “synthetic” to your ears and that‘s why you struggle to first translate your thoughts mentally before you even speak. I can’t stress the importance of context well enough.

Another problem with memorizing vocabulary lists out of context is the very method itself. Typically, you would go repeating the word and its English translation a few hundred times – aloud – and expect it to somehow drill into your memory. This is your way of nagging your brain into internalizing something it‘s clearly not willing to. After all, practice makes perfect, right? Wrong. Although, unfortunately, schools all over the world continue to perpetuate this system, it does little to help your brain “accept” what you learn. The word still sounds alien to you.

So what does one do? Just be creative. Fool your brain into seeing the foreign word as something familiar. Build a bridge between the alien word and its more familiar English counterpart. Use mnemonics. Use word-association. Use creative visualization. And in the case of most European languages, use etymology because almost all of them share a common heritage with English! This is how you learn dozens of words each day and never forget them for the rest of your life.

In the end, learning Spanish, just like learning anything, is an exercise in perseverance and creative thinking. Weave Spanish around yourself and it’ll be hard not to soak at least some of it up. Don’t wait for magic to happen – conjure up your own! If a person with absolutely zero “knack” for foreign languages from India – a country with far from adequate exposure to any foreign languages, let alone Spanish – can, so can you.