My tips for learning Spanish 1

[Manuel]

Below I have written down all the tips and advice I can think of. I am applying all of these tips myself at the moment with good results, so this has been field-tested! Just so ya know. J


Dictionary
I recommend you get the best, most comprehensive dictionary you can afford. This is an investment that will last you a lifetime, so get the very best. I myself have the best dictionary for Dutch-Spanish (and vice versa), made by a company called “Van Dale”. For English-Spanish dictionaries it will obviously be a different company. I don’t know which one is the best, but that is something you’d have to figure out for yourself. But I really recommend you avoid getting just a small pocket dictionary for the following reason: the biggest, most comprehensive dictionaries have a LOT more info on colloquial stuff and many more example phrases, synonyms etc. This is a great help when you’re learning.

I also recommend you get the electronic version of the dictionary (if it’s available) and put it on your computer. The reason for that is twofold:

• An electronic dictionary allows you to look up something much quicker. In a paper version of the dictionary you have to thumb through all the pages etc. In the electronic version you simply type in the word in the search box and instantly you are on the page. Makes life a lot easier, trust me on this. I have used paper versions of dictionaries all my life and since I’ve gotten the electronic version of my Spanish dictionary I never bother with the paper version anymore.
• You will use the dictionary a lot more when it’s ready and handy to use. For example, when you have a laptop and you are reading a Spanish website and you come across a word that you don’t know, you can simply go to your electronic dictionary and type in the word and bam! You’re ready to increase your vocabulary. With a paper dictionary, you’d have to pick it up, thumb through all the pages alphabetically to find the word etc. It’s just a bit more hassle. This may seem like a small thing, but what you have to realize is that just because something takes a bit more time and hassle you might be less inclined to do it often! I have certainly noticed this in my own life. Since I’ve gotten the electronic dictionary I have started using the dictionary so much more than before, simply because it is much less cumbersome to use. Don’t underestimate the simplicity of this! It really works; if your dictionary is always open, ready and handy to use (which it will be in the electronic version) you will be much more tempted to use it often. So if you can get an electronic version of the dictionary, I highly recommend it.

In addition to the bilingual dictionary I very much recommend you use a Spanish-Spanish dictionary as well. The reason for that is that in a bilingual dictionary you will often find that a single English word will have several different translations, but they are usually not completely interchangeable; each translation often has a slightly different meaning. These kinds of subtle differences can not be learned from a bilingual dictionary. You could always ask a native speaker, of course, but it’s a bit cumbersome to do that frequently. A Spanish-Spanish dictionary comes in very handy here, because there the word is being described, rather than being explained through another single word. In order to use a single language dictionary you will need to know enough Spanish to understand the description, of course, but it’s invaluable once you have achieved a higher level, in order to learn about the more subtle distinctions in vocabulary.

There is a great resource online, which is the dictionary of the Real Academia Española (http://www.rae.es/recursos/diccionarios/drae) I use this dictionary myself a lot these days. When I encounter a Spanish word I don’t know, I first look it up in my bilingual dictionary. If it has two or three (or sometimes even four!) different words for the word I was looking up and I am unsure about which one is most appropriate I enter those translations in the dictionary of the Real Academia and read the descriptions. This usually clears things up a lot more. Not always, but in those cases, I can always ask a native speaker.

Use the knowledge of native speakers
One tip I have, is to create a list for yourself of questions you want to pose to native speakers. You can of course immediately go to Tomísimo.org and ask the question when it occurs to you. But when you study Spanish a lot, in the beginning you might have MANY questions pop up. Rather than post them all immediately in the forum (which you may not even have time to do whenever they occur to you), just write them down on a list that you can refer to periodically. Give it whatever name you want, something like “Questions for native speakers”. Then, whenever you think of something that is not clear to you, write it down immediately on the list and then you can go to the forum when you have plenty of time and pose one of those questions there to a native speaker to get an answer.

I use a list like this myself because although I can find a lot of stuff in my dictionaries or online, sometimes there are finer distinctions that aren’t clear to me and then I write that down in my list so I can ask it later in a forum (or whenever I run into a native speaker in person.)

Practice habits
Regularity is much more imporant than the amount of time spent. Practicing for 5 minutes daily is much more effective than practicing for 35 minutes one day during the weekend. In both cases you will have spent 35 minutes in one week on it but in the first case you will work with the language much more often so that it sticks in your memory much better.

People often ask “How long will it take for me to learn this?” and the answer is “How long do you want it to take?” If the average person practices a language for 10 minutes a day and you practice it for 60 minutes a day, you will have 6 days of experience that others have in one day. Rather than asking how long something takes, you should ask yourself how much time has to be spent on it. It’s not about how much time passes while learning but about how much time you put into something. There’s no way around it; learning a language requires a big time investment. So the more time you put into it, the less time will have passed before you achieve a reasonable level. But regardless of how much time you put into it, it’s much better to do less each day but every day, than a lot but only during the weekend.

Increasing your vocabulary
I have a list of words that I wish to learn that I compiled myself, rather than learning words from a random list from a book, for example. The reason I did that is because when you learn words that other people give you, you will learn a lot of stuff you don’t really need right now.

The most important words to learn are the words that you will use often, but these are not the same words for everyone (except the most basic ones, of course, which everybody uses.)

How do you know which words you use often? By trying to think in Spanish. Then you will quickly find out which words you know and which words you don’t. Let’s say you are walking around your house and you pick up a knife and you try to think of the word for it in Spanish and you don’t know it. Voila! You now realize that you don’t know the word for it in Spanish, and would this be a useful word to add to your vocabulary? Of course, since it’s an item that you find in your environment, so it’s likely that it would be a word that you use often. By increasing your vocabulary this way you will gain a much more personal vocabulary, with all the words you often talk and think about, which is exactly what you NEED in order to express yourself.

So I recommend you create another list, namely a vocabulary one. All the lists I create for myself, by the way, are electronic because I sit behind my computer a lot. The advantage of electronic lists is also that they can easily be updated and/or reorganized. I have made my vocabulary list in the spreadsheet program Excel, which is very handy, but I guess any type of electronic list might do.

On this vocabulary list, write down any new word that you want to learn. Put words on it that you are really interested in, don’t just put every single word you don’t know on it! That defeats the purpose of making it a personal vocabulary list. Put words on it that you are genuinely curious about or wish to learn at this time (e.g. objects you see around your house, a particular word you read somewhere that you’re curious about, some word you couldn’t think of when you tried to think in Spanish etc.)

I write the word in my own language on the left and the Spanish translation to the right of it, because I try to memorize them that way (thinking of the word in my own language and then thinking of the Spanish word.) I do that because my main goal is to improve thinking and speaking Spanish, an active command of the language, in other words. Seeing a Spanish word and thinking of what it means is a more passive way of learning the language, which is of course also important, but I have found that if I can translate the Dutch word into Spanish, I usually know it the other way around too.

Once you have a number of words on your list, I add a ranking to each one and learn them through ranked repetition. This is a great tip I recently started applying from the book Fluent in three months by Benny Lewis.. I give the most difficult words a ranking of 10 and the easiest a ranking of 1 and then I rearrange the whole list in order of difficulty (putting the most difficult to remember words, that are ranked 10, at the top.) This way, the words that I find the hardest to learn are always at the top of the list and I know where to spend most of my focus when learning from the list. This ranking system is another great reason for using electronic lists because with a paper list you’d have to rewrite the whole list everytime you want to move a word down or up the ranking! In Excel, rearranging the order is as simple as a few clicks.

Another tip for memorizing words is to create an image in your mind for all the words you learn. When you memorize the Spanish word for “table”, for example, picture a table in your mind as you say the word “la mesa.” Connecting an abstract symbol (which is what a word is) to an image, makes it far more memorable. I also recommend you learn every Spanish noun always together with its article, so always say or think “la mesa”, not “mesa” when you think of a table. That way you won’t forget whether the word is masculine or femenine.

Another tip for learning vocabulary: when a feminine Spanish word starts with an accented “a”, then the article “la” (for feminine words) changes to “el” (the article for masculine words). So for example, the word “aula” (which means classroom) is feminine, but since it starts with an accented “a”, you say “el aula”, not “la aula”.

So if you memorize this word by thinking “el aula”, after a while you might be tempted to think that it’s masculine, when it’s not. It’s important to remember that it is a feminine word because the adjective (the word that modifies this noun) follows the feminine form. For example, if you want to say “the small classroom”, it would be “el aula pequeña”. The adjective “small” (pequeño/a) has the feminine form here because aula is feminine, not masculine, even though you have to use “el” (for the reason I’ve explained already.) I hope this is clear!

So what I recommend is that when you try to memorize feminine words that start with an accented a, add an adjective to the word and memorize it together. So instead of just memorizing “el aula”, meaning “the classroom”, memorize “el aula pequeña”, meaning “the small classroom” because then the adjective will remind you that the word is feminine. You have to invent an adjective for every word like this that you want to memorize but I think it’s very helpful. I’ll give you one other example: the word “eagle” in Spanish is the feminine word “águila”. So don’t memorize “el águila” but perhaps “el águila bonita” , meaning “the beautiful eagle”. Again, the word bonita will remind you that águila is feminine, not masculine. Just remember to use an adjective that ends on –a for the feminine form, because not all of them do. For example, the adjective “big” is “grande” which stays the same for masculine and feminine, so that wouldn’t be useful for this.

Think in Spanish
This is perhaps the best tip I can give you. At least it’s the one that has helped me the most. It has been the most helpful and at the same time most frustrating and tiring thing to practice! (which I suspect is why so few people actually do it.)

Allow me to explain why I think this is absolutely essential to do.

Most people that learn a foreign language do so because they want to be able to speak it. Now, the best way to learn how to speak is, of course, to practice speaking. But that is not how most people practice a foreign language. They usually spend most of their time studying grammar, translating sentences, writing, reading, and listening. Speaking takes up a very small part of their study time because most people think they need to achieve a certain level before they are “ready” to speak. This is something that that book I sent you also talks about in detail, so I won’t go into that here. The author also mentions that you should practice thinking in Spanish, but he doesn’t go into much detail about how or why.

Let’s talk about the why first. Have you ever asked yourself what speaking really is?

Speaking is the verbal expression of your thoughts

In other words, it’s something that you do out loud and it involves another person that you are speaking to. That’s why most people think that you need other people in order to practice speaking. This is NOT TRUE. You can practice speaking all by yourself.

How?

By speaking to yourself.

[Mozzo]

I think there's a lot of good advice here and I won't contradict it - but I will say a few things in support of paper dictionaries. They're cheap (especially used), and I don't mind taping tabs on the pages or circling/underlining words. Or even totally blacking out stuff I don't want to see any more, like the definition of "perro" etc. View the cheap paper dictionary as more like a workbook than something to preserve.

[Aprendo]

Very helpful.

Gracias, Manuel.