Hola a todos!
It' s very interesting to read all your thoughts about this topic, gracias por eso!
I would like to add something brief (well.. ok maybe not extremely brief..
) about my own experience(s) if I may.
I have attempted to learn Spanish one time before. I bought the books, (i.e. idiom, verbs, verb-practise). I really did want to make a good start but somehow I gave up after about 3 weeks. I wasn' t motivated to look into the book every day and make exercises. This wasa few years ago. I have been wanting to learn Spanish since (because I think it' s a beautiful language and because I love travelling to South America!
).
So this time I have decided to go about it very differently, as it seems the approach I tried before did not work. So about 2 months ago (I have been studying Spanish for about 2 months) I decided to take a very different approach in that I was determined to find things that would keep me going, that would make the learning experience varied, stimulating and also ' forcing' me to keep busy, keep doing something every day to make myself get used to integrating Spanish into my life (as I think this is really the only way to learn it). You might call it 'discipline' maybe although my approach seems way too chaotic to justify that word..
I decided to connect to people (i.e. 'tandem partner and penpals') so I would feel a little social pressure in a sence (apart from it being a very good and nice way to learn it does make you want to advance as well..). My friends here don't speak Spanish so they would not be able to appreciate any difference or imrpovement. Now having had 2 months of exchange on skype with one new Spanish friend (bonus!) we can definitely notice improvements and are more aware of the things we can help eachother with
Apart from this I have been trying to ' raise the bar' in the sense that I have wanted to submerge myself in as many ways as I can, as I think this most naturally mimics the natural way in which we learn a language- not knowing things, learning them as we go along, being surrounded by them and building our understanding in the process. So I have been trying to read forums, listen to many podcasts, now slowly advancing to listening music and interviews on the radio, watching tv and reading a book/ listening to an audiobook. This in combination with brief chats (msn), adhoc exercise such as short messages to be corrected on a forum, longer emails to be corrected (snailmail) to train the use of less common words of grammar constructs, and skype sessions varing from 30 minutes to more than an hour, I think are starting to really have their effects now.
It seems a lot, but I think anyone can or could do this if you are commited enough. it does not have to be much more than half an hour in a day, listening to a podcast, making a short exercise, reading a few pages or some subjects on a forum.
I am not sure if this constitutes to ' submergence' into language but I do try to expose myself to it in as many ways as I can, and whenever I can. For example, I enjoy watching travel documentaries or documentaries in general. Instead of watching them in Dutch or English I will now watch them in Spanish instead (or I will download a Spanish version of a series I enjoy and find the subtitles online to watch it in Spanish instead). In the beginning this took a lot of energy but now, after a few weeks, I am noticing sometimes I am starting to recognize and understand certain parts without having to wind back and listen again.
Obviously I don' t understand everything or literally, but I have noticed words are starting to stick, I am starting to use them and/ or recognize constructions. So I will continue doing this, because I think we learn both consciously and subconsciously (i.e. recognizing what does or does not ' sound' right).
I am quite an advocate of it in fact because I think I have learned most of my English through watching American and English tv being subtitled- even if naturally it is tought in school and used at university. I'm not claiming we should learn exclusively from tv of course, but I do believe that diversifying the way we ' take in' a language as much as possible in reading, listening, writing and speaking it, will help learning the language that much quicker.
Plus it makes you more stimulated/determined to keep it up, and it' s more fun because you can more quickly notice the effect of your learning process (it is more relevant when you can out what you have learned to use).