Learn Spanish Effectively
When you learn Spanish, it is not about the amount of years or hours that you put into language learning. Rather, how effective is your method of learning.
Let me just give you two examples: you have probably heard people describing their Spanish fluency as “I learned Spanish for four years in college, but I can’t remember much of it.” On the other hand, you may have met people who lived in Mexico for a half year a while back and they still speak fluent Spanish. In average, the person who lived a half year abroad probably spent less time on language learning than the one who learned in college.
The difference between the two examples above is that the one who learned the language in college followed a set course and looked at building up language skills in several years. The second, who lived in a Spanish language environment, used Spanish as natives do, interacted in real life situations, heard and repeated the most frequent words, phrases and grammatical structures.
And this is all that matter when you learn Spanish. If you want to put your language skills into practice quickly, you need to learn those words which people use most often.
Did you know for example that we only use 2000 words 80 percent of the time we speak? And we don’t even need that many to survive in most every day situations.
If you only learn 20 words a day, in about three months you will be able to comprehend 80 percent of what people say around you in Spanish. In a sophisticated language course, you can learn 5000 words, but if you don’t learn the basics, you will be able to read the news but you won’t be able to order a cup of coffee.
The other secret of learning Spanish more effectively is repetition. If you concentrate on the most important words, also make sure you use them and hear them often. Just because you memorize 20 words a day, they will be forgotten as quickly as you have learned them.
However, if you hear certain words on a regular basis those words will stick for a long time. You won’t even have to bother memorizing them.
This is what the Pimsleur Approach takes into account. It teaches you the most relevant, most frequently used words and makes you repeat them until you are bored of it. You can be sure you will be able to remember these words when you need them.
Just don’t forget to impress your friends when they hear you being at ease with Spanish that you only spent a month to learn it.
Click here to visit the official Pimsleur web site!
Comments are closed.
