[Manuel]

Originally Posted by Glen

Please don't, Manuel - those are some of the most useful tips I've ever heard anywhere. They're worth reading again and again.

Thank you very much Glen. I know they have helped me a lot. Especially the last part about thinking in Spanish. In fact, I think that is the main reason why anyone can speak their native language so fluently. It's not because you HEAR your own language repeatedly and therefore it sinks in quickly (as many people suggest.) I think it's because you USE your own language all the time. But like I said, you don't NEED anyone else to use a language, you can speak to yourself all day long. I do that in my own language too, actually. If you think about it, it's a bit schizophrenic in a way , but it most definitely works!

Some additional tips then for what to practice thinking in the foreign language:

1. Describe what you can observe around you. If you're just starting out in Spanish and you know very few or no verbs at all, simply think the nouns or adjectives to yourself. (You can continue to do this for as long as you want to improve, by the way. I am increasing my vocabulary at a much faster rate this way then how I used to do it, through reading and looking up words I was unfamiliar with etc.)

Examples:

• You're walking outside and there's a strong wind blowing, you think "viento."
• You are doing the dishes and picking up a knife to clean, you think "cuchillo" or perhaps better "un/el cuchillo" (so that you remember whether the word is masculine or femenine.)
• As soon as you have learned numbers and plural forms you can think things like "tres cuchillos" etc.
• You're in a museum and looking at a beautiful painting, you think "bonito" or perhaps "¡Qué bonito!" if you've already learned that.

When you start to learn verbs you can start describing actions in your head, like things you or other people are doing.

Examples:

• Whenever you're hungry, say to yourself "Tengo hambre." If you're really hungry, say "tengo mucha hambre." (which will help you to remember that the word hambre is femenine)
• You are watching standup comedy and laughing your butt off, you think "es muy gracioso" (he's very funny) etc. etc.
• You are home, looking in your fridge and it's empty, you think to yourself "Tengo que ir a la compra" (I have to go shopping) etc.

There's an infinite number of short phrases you can think to yourself. Be creative, the possibilities are endless. And remember, immediately USE whatever new thing you learn. So if you've learned the conjunction "except", like "excepto" or "menos", try to come up with some simple thing you can think in Spanish using this new thing you've just learned. For example, if you already know things like "gustar" and "vino" you could think something like "Me gustan todos los vinos menos el Rioja." (I like all wines except Rioja).

By describing to yourself what you observe and what is happening around you, you will very quickly learn to speak a lot better about everything that is going ON around you. That much should be obvious.

2. "Freestyle" to yourself about a random topic. This is useful when you are a bit more advanced (when you can form complete and longer sentences, and have learned the different tenses etc.)

This works as follows:

Just take any random topic, doesn't matter what it is. You can take a single word (like "fish", "holidays"), an idea (like "beauty", "assertiveness", or "the economic crisis"), a phrase (like "renting cars at the airport" etc.) and then talk to yourself about it. Just "freestyle" about it, like a rapper would, only in complete and correct sentences. In a sense, you just talk about it like you would talk about it to someone else, except there's no one there to respond to what you say, but you don't need that. You just think about the topic and say to yourself whatever comes to mind. You can do this anytime, anywhere throughout the day because you don't have to say things out loud.

I use this all the time, everywhere I go. I might be walking outside to go to the supermarket and spot a bird in a tree and try to think whatever I can about that bird in Spanish (let's say it's a magpie and I don't know the name of that bird in Spanish.) It might go something like this :

"¿Hmm, cómo se llama ese pájaro en español? Es muy bonito. Los pájaros tienen una vida muy fácil. No tienen que trabajar. Pueden volar y trinar todo el santo día..." etc. (Hmmm, what do you call that bird in Spanish? It's very pretty. Birds have a very easy life. They don't have to work. They can fly and sing the whole day etc.)

Now, obviously, the more Spanish you know, the more interesting your thoughts can be about something, so you have to try to come up with whatever you CAN. Perhaps you can think nothing more than something like "Me gustan los pájaros." (I like birds) but that is just fine.

By freestyling about any and every topic you will quickly learn to think in the new language and an additional benefit is that you will also quickly find out which words and grammatical areas are LACKING in your vocabulary!

Let's say you see a certain type of dog and the thought "I used to own one of those as a pet!" comes up but you notice you don't know how to say "I used to" in Spanish. Then you have found out a certain grammatical construction that you need to know in order to think the things you want to think and express! So when this happens, you have to capture that immediately, because if you try to remember to look it up later in the day, you will often forget and then later not remember what it was you needed to learn. You can either write it down (on paper, or perhaps in your mobile phone) or record it with a voice recorder (that is definitely the easiest and quickest). Then, when you have recorded it somewhere you can forget about it and look it up later.

It's also great to freestyle about topics that are more abstract (ideas etc.) like "going through a divorce", "religion in China", "cities to visit" , "books on art" , "ways to attract people to parties", "your favorite celebrity" etc. etc.

A great way to generate ideas for topics like these is to use a random topic generator on the Internet. (All of the above topics came from one I use myself, in fact.) But you can also simply brainstorm topics yourself. Apart from using a random topic generator, I highly recommend that you freestyle to yourself about topics that you are actually interested in. What kind of things do you normally occupy yourself with? What are your hobbies? What kind of topics do you like to read about? What do you THINK about all day? Instead of doing that in your own language, start thinking about all those things in Spanish, as simple as you may have to start out with, doesn't matter.

If you're into sports, then think about those sports and talk to yourself about them in Spanish. If you like music and regularly go to see live music in a bar, for example, then the next time you are there, try to think about the band and what you think of the music in Spanish, rather than your own language.

Here's a list of random topic generators on the Internet to spark your creativity:

http://www.blogtap.net/blogtopicgenerator/
http://www.conversationstarters.com/generator.php
http://www.ratespeeches.com/t=Speech-Topics


Finally, all of these examples start out with very simple, short phrases and build on that, but to learn how to speak it's much better to practice THINKING phrases like these and constructing them yourself than to translate sentences on paper.

This is the reason why:

A word is a symbol for something. It represents an object or an idea but the word itself is just a few letters arranged on a page. That's why if you learn new words by trying to memorize their translation you are trying to remember a symbol by remembering the corresponding symbol in your OWN language! This CAN work of course, but it's not the way you learned your own language.

When you think of the word "table" in your own language, you connect those 5 letters to the image of an actual physical table itself! And not only that, but you often see and can feel tables in your daily life, so that connection between the word "table" and a real, physical table in your experience is constantly being reinforced. That's why you quickly memorize what table means and it stays in your long-term memory.

But now take a foreign language. You learn that "mesa" means "table" in Spanish. And so you have learned a new word, but NOT by associating "mesa" with an actual table, but by associating "mesa" with the WORD "table". So now imagine you've learned and memorized the word "mesa" in Spanish and you're in Spain sitting at an actual table. If you want to say something about the table you are sitting at, you would first remember your own language and how that thing you're sitting at is called a table, and then remember in your head that "table" in English is "mesa" in Spanish.

It should be obvious that you can never speak fluently if you need to translate things in your head first. But it's more problematic than that. By practicing translation of sentences you will not create this connection between words as symbols for things in the real world. It will all remain much more abstract if you try to remember what a word means by trying to remember it with ANOTHER word. But if every time you sit at a table, you look at it and think "la/una mesa" to yourself, you are reinforcing the connection between the actual OBJECT itself and the word in Spanish. This eliminates the need for translation in your head first. And consequently, it's exactly how you learned your OWN language. You don't just remember all the words in your own language because you have heard them thousands of times (although that of course does play a part) but it's also because you connect every word with your daily experience of what the word stands for.

If you do that by thinking in Spanish about everything that's in your life, not only will you improve MUCH faster, but the study of the language will also be a lot more FUN. You will start to feel like someone who can actually SPEAK Spanish, even though you are just speaking silently to yourself and there isn't a Spanish speaking person within a 1,000 miles from you. Because whatever you say to yourself silently in your head, you can also say out loud to someone else!