I do not think anyone can deny the fact that Spanish is one of the most spoken languages in the world. My presence in the tri-states brought me to understand that I might need to learn Spanish. So I felt that I might give it a try and the result was amazing. I could see myself feeling so entertained whilst learning Spanish.
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Como todos los idiomas, no es fácil aprender otro idioma. – Like every language, it is not easy to learn another language. However, I think the regular learning method is not the right way for me, that is understanding vocabulary, grammar, etc right from the beginning. So, I decided to use my own method. To be honest, I never thought that I would be able to speak Spanish.
Step 1 – learning Spanish
Step 1 was to get acquainted directly with small phrases. The objective is to be able to convey the meaning of a phrase and convey how to make words sounds and means. I think someone might be able to mentally translate a phrase from English to Spanish but if non-verbal communication is excluded, it’s not really fun. Let’s say in English you said “What a pity!” The facial expression is definitely different and the expression is definitely unique to oneself, meaning, non-verbal communication in language learning is definitely the most important thing. In Spanish its ‘Que lastima!”. So you cannot just say the same phrase in a way without conveying feelings into it. So here comes youtube.com, I discovered a channel that does some basic phrase translation by Polyglot Pablo.
So I started repeating after the guy every time there it switch to a new sentence until I could just say the phrase faster than him once he swapped from English to Spanish. Cool idea right? Kind of a game. I played this for four months in my car whilst driving, in the bathroom, and before sleeping. I noticed I could grasp every single phrase easily. At this point, I know I don’t have any grammar or vocabulary notions. Another discovery I made is the “I” is expressed very differently in many situations. But I focus mainly on repetition and conveying non-verbal communication – just like in a theater or movie.
Step 2 – Practice some phrases with native-speaking people
So whenever I find it difficult to understand any phrase, I just reach out to a few people who speak Spanish and practice that phrase or short sentence with that person and see if they understand me. At the same time, when it is being practiced, that gets registered in the brain way faster. Three simple phrases that I thought were almost impossible and that I could never remember are: A la derecha (to the right), a la esquierda (to the left), and siga derecho (go straight forward). One way to practice is to meet people in language meetups that occurred in the community which was very helpful to me.
Step 3 – What’s next after 4 months?
The journey does not end up here. Although one may master all the 400 Spanish phrases, it’s now much more motivating to learn the alphabet. Butterfly Spanish channel on youtube was my way out. So I learned the Spanish alphabet.
What’s next?
So now I am planning to add more words to my brain such as colors, numbers, and consequently longer phrases. In the future, I will focus more on grammar and vocabulary. Another important thing, that I noticed is to have a starting point which for me is to introduce myself. So I managed to learn how to introduce myself and try to build on top of that when questions arise. I hope this blog was useful to anyone who came across it. Ahora, es muy divertido aprendiende un otro idiomas. In another blog post, I would like to share how I am learning Mandarin/Pinyin language as well. Keep in touch. Cheers.
