Learning Spanish in 3 Months: Progress Report

If you’ve read my 2011 Year Plan, you will remember that one of my goals for the year is to learn Spanish up to a conversational level.

So, how’s it going?

Muy bien doesn’t even begin to cover it.

I’ve been coming in and out of it in waves, on a huge high one day, followed by an impossible low the next. The positives, however, far outweigh the negatives.

Deciding to learn Spanish was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’m nearing two months into my three month intensive learning and I am fairly astonished by how much I have learned, and more importantly, how much I have retained, in this small amount of time.

The resources I have used aren’t new. The reason they’ve worked so well, despite being brilliant products, is because I’ve made a revision plan and stuck to it. The two main resources I have been using are…

Michel Thomas Spanish Foundation Course

I tried another, cheaper, teach yourself Spanish CD series last year and couldn’t stick to it.

It was boring, non-engaging and it only seemed to focus on learning phrases, not learning how those phrases and words came to be.

Michel Thomas couldn’t be further from that. His course is about double the price of others available (though still pennies compared to private tuition) and I was incredibly impressed from the first lesson onwards.

He teaches you the way school teachers should teach you. You work alongside two students he is working with on the CD. You genuinely feel like you’re in the lesson with them – the pressure is on when he asks you to form sentence after sentence as he constantly does.

Highly recommended, I’ll be purchasing the Advanced Course very shortly.

Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish by Margarita Madrigal

I found this book through a recommendation by another customer on the Michel Thomas Spanish Foundation Course Amazon page. They called it the “perfect compliment” to the CDs.

I headed over to the product page, checked out the five star reviews and purchased it right away. This book is incredibly good at doing what it’s designed to do: teach you Spanish.

First published in 1951, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, like the foundation course above, is a series of lessons followed by tests throughout.

It’s very easy to understand, and particularly funny in places. Having been written in 1951, it contains some rather outdated words: teaching you the word for “Gee whiz” for example (Caramba) and referencing the devil every few pages – ¿Dónde está el Diablo? El diabo está en el infierno.

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I have also learnt a lot from the brilliant blog by Irishman Benny Lewis over at Fluent in 3 Months.

I found Fluent in 3 Months by simply typing that very phrase into Google, trying to see whether it was a reasonable goal (see below). If you have any interest in language at all check out Benny’s site. It’s inspiration by the bucket load.

Despite using brilliant methods, my rate of learning is even more impressive considering how terrible I was at languages at school.

I studied French for five years, and Spanish for only one. I simply couldn’t pick any of it up save the odd word or phrase.

When I was introduced to a French friend of mines dad for the first time, we discussed language – in English – and he asked if I had learnt French at school. I told him I’d studied it for five years. His response? “So why can’t you speak French?”

In my opinion, the majority of the failure to take away any reasonable language skills from learning languages at school, as can often be the case among many students, rests on the shoulders of the teaching methods. I was so bad at French that, aged sixteen, in the final six months leading up to my French GCSE exam I would attend lunchtime sessions with the French tutor to try to give me a fighting chance of gaining anything above an E.

I eventually scraped home a D – something I couldn’t have been happier to receive.

Bad teaching methods don’t necessarily represent a bad teacher, and that was certainly not the case for my sixteen year-old self in French class. The set-up of such lessons, like anything else in the world, will not change without a huge reform taking place.

It’s a case of “We do it this way because that’s how we’ve always done it”, or “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Unfortunately although these set-ups aren’t broken, they are incredibly inefficient at best, but because it works sometimes, for some students, it stays on and people continue not to learn, and often question themselves, assuming that they just can’t learn languages – eventually giving up altogether.

Back to the present day. I knew I had to apply new ideas, and use all the technology around me, to think smarter.

Firstly, I gave myself an overall goal – something to aim for. I decided to give myself just three months – a quarter of a year – to gain conversational fluency in Spanish. I defined this as being able to hold a five minute conversation with a native Spanish speaker, but your definition needn’t be the same. As long as you set out AND DEFINE your goal at the very beginning you will have something reasonable to work towards.

For my personal goal, where was I going to find a native Spanish speaker?

I live in London, so I just have to step out the front door to pick up Spanish conversation here and there. But that didn’t sound like that much fun. I wouldn’t be able to force myself to sit down for three hours of intensive Spanish 3-4 times a week if all I had to look forward to was a chat in the local supermarket.

I needed a more exciting goal, something that wasn’t just a reward – but something that related to the task at hand.

It has been an idea of mine for a while, so when trying to work out my main reasons for learning Spanish it came straight to the forefront: I want to travel across South America.

This forms its own entry in my 2011 Year Plan, despite it actually being planned for early 2012. For this reason once my three months are up I plan to continue to learn Spanish less intensively, as well as discovering the range of differences between the Spanish spoken mostly in Spain, and the Spanish spoken in Latin America. I will also look into Portuguese, indicating the key differences between Spanish and Portuguese (Brazilian Portuguese specifically).

Before then, as an ending point and main focus to the three months of intensive learning, I am heading out to Barcelona for a few days at the end of March.

As a 22 year old Englishman I should have been to Spain getting on for six-hundred times by now, but somehow it’s always passed me by. Despite Catalan taking Spanish’s place as the official and most widely spoken language in Barcelona, I intend to inflict my three months of practice on anybody who will listen.

I’ll keep you posted. Gracias y adiós.

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