Why you Should Learn Spanish
Everyone thinking of living in Ecuador should learn enough Spanish to make the human connections that are important to all of us.
Even if you only learn how to order breakfast, haggle over prices, and say thank you, that will improve your quality of life immensely.
When you learn Spanish, you will no longer be apart from the people of Ecuador, you will be part of them.
You may even learn enough Spanish to read the daily newspaper, watch movies in Spanish, or meet the love of your life in Ecuador. (I did!)
How I learned Spanish
I learned Spanish by taking classes, listening to tapes, reading books, and doing a semester abroad program in Ecuador. It took me two years to learn a decent level of conversational Spanish, as an adult.
I was not a successful language learner before I learned Spanish. I didn't remember anything of the German and Latin I took in high school.
I didn't want to learn Spanish. I was told that I had to take a foreign language in order to graduate from college. I chose Spanish because it seemed like the most useful second language to have in the United States.
My first days in college Spanish class were demoralizing. Most of the other students were coming out of four years of high school Spanish, and were only taking Spanish I in college to get an easy A. I, on the other hand, knew nothing.
My plan had been to just get my two years of Spanish out of the way and be done with it. But I started to learn Spanish that first year, and changed my mind. Now I wanted to see if I could really learn Spanish. I asked my Spanish teachers for advice. They recommended that I take a year abroad in a Spanish-speaking country.
I wanted to go to Ecuador because I was studying biology and knew of Ecuador's biodiversity, but my school would not let me go to Ecuador without two years of Spanish. I took an intensive Spanish course, which was like a whole second year of Spanish in one semester. Then I went to Ecuador.
Only one phrase rolled off my tongue when I landed in Quito, "Estoy muy contento de estar aquí" (I am very happy to be here), a phrase that two Panamanians had taught me on the plane and which I had been practicing the whole rest of my flight to Ecuador.
I was persistent though, and because I had good training before I got to Ecuador and while I was there, after 8 months in Ecuador I started to really get a hold of Spanish.
Here are some things I can do in Spanish now: 1) read articles in El Comercio, the Quito newspaper, without referring to a dictionary, 2) understand what's on the radio and T.V. in Spanish, 3) carry on conversations on pretty much any topic that comes up, and more. You get the idea.
I do not have the fluency of a native speaker, by any means, and I have a gringo accent, but I can function in any Spanish-speaking environment that I find myself in, and that is a reasonable goal for those of us who learn Spanish as adults.
Should You Wait until you are in Ecuador to Learn Spanish?
No.
The reason my university required me to have two years of Spanish before going to Ecuador was that my chances of learning Spanish successfully in Ecuador with no prior preparation whatsoever would have been very low. My first day in Spanish class in the United States, my teacher approached me and said, "Hola." I froze. I didn't even know that "hola" meant hello. I knew nothing. Can you imagine if I had gotten off the plane in Ecuador with so few language skills, compounded by the problem of culture shock?
Almost all universities (I would say "all", but I'm not sure) require students to have two years of a foreign language before going on a year abroad.
Sooner or later you will run across somebody (if you haven't already), who will tell you that you can only learn Spanish by living in a foreign country. I suspect that many people who say that have forgotten the Spanish they studied in their home country before going abroad. Those years of study are the foundation on which learning takes place once you are in a Spanish-speaking country.
I don't want to discredit anyone who has gone to a Spanish-speaking country cold and learned Spanish quickly on their own. There are such people out there. But for most of us, the route has to be 1) Study at home first, and get as high a level of conversational Spanish as you can, and 2) Then go to a Spanish-speaking country, and immerse yourself in the language and culture.
How to Learn Spanish
You are going to have to spend some money to learn Spanish, either on classes, books, a tutor, or travel to a foreign country.
There are four skills that you need in Spanish, reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Of the four, the hardest to learn for most people is listening. I'll explain that in a second.
Classes
If you have the time and the money to take Spanish classes, do it. It worked for me. Spanish classes can be expensive, especially for higher quality classes. I would look at your local community college first, but make sure that you don't get stuck in a large class, especially if there are a number of students who are not highly motivated. If you can afford to hire a private tutor, better still.
One of the most valuable skills that I picked up from taking Spanish classes that I would not have picked up from studying on my own was how to write formal written Spanish. People who hear my gringo accent are often surprised that I write severely correct written Spanish. I don't write in Spanish much, but it is a useful skill to have when I need it. I learned how to write in Spanish class. To learn how to write Spanish correctly, you really have to have a teacher correcting things that you write every day. But again, there are teachers and there are teachers, and there are classes and there are classes. You won't learn anything unless your classmates and teacher are as highly motivated as you are. Your 45 minutes a day would be better spent studying on your own if your class is a dud.
Learn at Home Spanish Programs
If you can't take classes, I recommend that you buy a language learning program. Two of the best known are Rocket Spanish and Rosetta Stone Spanish. Rocket Spanish is cheaper.
I previewed Rocket Spanish and it has everything you need to learn elementary Spanish. It has positive reviews all over the web. (If you decide to order Rocket Spanish or anything else I suggest on this webpage, I would appreciate your doing it through the links on this page, which earns me a commission and will help keep me blogging.)
Rosetta Stone Spanish also has a lot of positive reviews on Amazon.
The thing that Rocket Spanish (and I'm sure Rosetta Stone Spanish too) does right is put a lot of audio in their lessons.
These programs are not expensive when you compare them to the cost of university classes or travel abroad to learn Spanish.
Reading, Writing, Speaking, Listening
Reading and writing are the easiest skills in Spanish to learn. The words sit still for you. You can take all the time you want to figure out a written sentence; it isn't going anywhere. And there is no chance that you will misunderstand what was said. After all, it is written down. You can even look it up in a dictionary if you want.
Listening comprehension is the hardest skill to learn. Spoken speech happens fast, and the speaker will not alter the speed of their speech or their vocabulary to suit you. If you miss what they say, it's gone.
Speaking is easier than listening, because you can choose your own vocabulary and speak at your own pace.
Lets look at that in a little more detail.
Let's say you learn a single way to say "How beautiful!" in Spanish, "¡Qué hermoso!" You repeat "¡Qué hermoso!" every time you see something that is beautiful. Your friends will get sick of hearing you say "¡Qué hermoso!", but you will be expressing the idea that you want to express correctly.
However, when you are listening to a native Spanish speaker, they might say, "¡Qué lindo!" or "¡Qué precioso!" or "¡Qué bello!", all of which mean the same thing. If you don't know what all those phrases are, you're lost.
Now look at a slightly more complex idea. How many ways are there in English to say that you're going to be late? "I'm going to be late." "I'm running a little behind." "I'm not sure I'll make it on time." "You may have to start the meeting without me." And so on, ad infinitum.
Now put yourself in the shoes of the poor person who is learning English as a second language. They have learned the set phrase, "I'm going to be late." However, they are not prepared for all the other ways that you might say the same thing. It confuses them.
And of course ideas get more complex than "How beautiful!" or "I'm going to be late."
That is why we have to spend so much time listening to Spanish to get anywhere. Listening forces us to deal with other people's vocabulary and speech patterns. The importance of listening comprehension is why your high school language teacher made you go to language lab so much.
Imagine your counterpart in another country trying to learn English. They know they have an accent in English. They watched a T.V. show once in English and didn't understand anything. Intimidated, they buy a book about English and decide to study it alone in their room, to avoid listening and speaking to anyone. Are they going to learn English? No.
In the same way, if you are reading a book about Spanish alone in your room, and aren't listen to a lot of Spanish and trying to seek out people to speak with, you are fooling yourself.
What you are Buying with Rocket Spanish or Rosetta Stone Spanish
In my opinion, the most important thing that you are buying with these two programs is the audio component. Rocket Spanish has many tens of hours of audio files. I'm sure that Rosetta Stone Spanish is the same.
If you were to try to duplicate what is in these audio files on your own, it would take a tremendous amount of time, and knowledge that you don't yet have. There is no way that you can know what the most important vocabulary words and grammatical constructions are in Spanish before learning Spanish! What Rocket Spanish and Rosetta Stone Spanish give you is a graded series of lessons with a language lab component.
How to Listen to Spanish I
Let's say that you are enrolled in a Spanish class, or have purchased Rocket Spanish or Rosetta Stone Spanish. You will have an audio component if you bought either of the two programs, and your Spanish teacher should have also given you tapes to listen to. (Does saying "tapes" date me? It probably does. I guess all of this stuff is done on computer now, although I carried cassettes around when I was learning Spanish, and it was not that long ago.)
The first thing to do is load all of the audio files onto your Ipod. You can easily do that from Rocket Spanish or Rosetta Stone Spanish. The second thing to do is listen to them as much as you can, without any supporting materials to look at, until you actually understand what people are saying. The key here is repetition, lots of repetition. It is boring, and you are not going to like it. But you have to do it if you want to learn Spanish.
When you use Rocket Spanish on the computer, you follow short conversations between two native speakers, then practice the conversations line by line. You have the conversations in front of you to read. The conversations are appropriate for beginning Spanish speakers, but not too simple. After listening and understanding, you record yourself speaking each line of the conversation and compare your pronunciation to the native speaker's pronunciation. You can listen and record as many times as you like. You keep track of your progress and move on to new lessons when you are ready. There are other bells and whistles that keep the program interesting. There are also culture lessons in addition to language lessons.
But you also have to listen to the audio files without any supporting materials. Take the same lessons that you did on the computer, lie back on your bed, close your eyes, and keep listening to them on your ipod until you understand them and can say them yourself. It may take 5, 10, or even 25 times listening to master certain lessons, but you have to do it. Your Spanish audio files have to become your new favorite song on your Ipod.
How to Listen to Spanish II
After I got pretty good at understanding the conversations on my audio tapes, I decided to do some serious listening comprehension in real life.
With all due respect to my Spanish teachers (and they deserve a lot of respect, they were all wonderful people without whom I never would have learned Spanish), what I am about to tell you is the number one tip that helped me break through the wall of listening comprehension in Spanish.
One afternoon I was flipping through the radio dial, and I stopped for a second on a Spanish channel and realized I didn't understand a word they were saying. I taped the program, just a random half hour of noise, and decided that I was going to learn what they were saying, no matter what.
And I did learn what they were saying, by listening to that tape more than a hundred times. After maybe a dozen listenings, a few random words began to float up into my mind, and then with repeated listenings the rest of the words crystallized around those first seeds. At last I could understand the show, which was interesting. And these were real Spanish speakers, speaking real Spanish, rapidly!
I had ended up taping a Latin lonely hearts show, where people called in, told something about themselves, and then the announcers put them on hold while other people called in and tried to get dates. It was a useful show to listen to, because people described many ordinary likes and dislikes (food, music, habits, things like that) that it was good to get in my vocabulary.
The key to understanding the show though, was repeated listening. If you have a hundred hours of listening time to put in over a hundred days, then listen to that same show a hundred times. Don't listen to 100 different shows, once each. You won't get anywhere. Each day will be like starting over, instead of building on what you learned the day before. You have to repeat your listening, like memorizing scales in music.
The reason this tip is "How to Listen to Spanish II" instead of "How to Listen to Spanish I", is that you won't benefit from listening to a real life Spanish tape until you have mastered the basics in Spanish. My hours with boring Spanish I and II audio tapes allowed me to have success with my real-life Spanish tape. Get Rocket Spanish or Rosetta Stone Spanish, master all the audio files, then move on to real life Spanish. You will have a framework in your mind that real life Spanish can crystallize around, if you work at it.
How to Read, Write, and Speak Spanish
Speaking comes from listening. You have to imitate what you hear. I'm convinced that we all learn this way at first, through imitation. Just look at children. You move your hands a certain way, and so do they, before understanding what they are doing.
As adults, we think that imitation is for kids. We want to understand everything that is going on underneath the surface of a sentence or phrase, before we use it. You have to get rid of that idea when you are learning a new language. Just repeat what you know to be the correct phrase, even if you don't understand it. The understanding will come. When learning language, the correct action precedes understanding, not the other way around.
You may already know that "lo siento," means "I'm sorry," in Spanish. Except that it doesn't. It means "I feel it."
If somebody says to you in Spanish, "Siento un viento frío" (I feel a cold wind), then you might say in Spanish, "Lo siento también,¨ (I feel it too.)
But now you can see how "lo siento" takes the place of "I'm sorry" in English. Somebody says, "Se murió mi perro," (My dog died), and you answer, ¨Lo siento", in other words, I feel it, my emotions are with you.
If you insist on having all that explained to you when you are learning Spanish, you won't get anywhere. But one day, Ding! A bell will go off, and you'll say, "Oh, now I get it!" Do the right thing first, and understanding will follow.
Reading and writing can be learned from books. A teacher will improve your writing immensely.
Dictionaries
The best Spanish dictionary for native speakers of English is the Oxford Spanish Dictionary
.I have this dictionary, an old edition from the mid-90s. The spine is broken on mine, but I have kept it around. When I brought it to Spanish class the first day, my teacher held it up over her head and told the rest of the class what a great dictionary that it was, and that they should get one too.
The reviews on Amazon are overwhelmingly positive. The only people who ding this book do not like the binding, so it seems that Oxford hasn't fixed that problem since I bought mine way back when.
The reason I like this dictionary so much is that it is easily usable (short, no-nonsense definitions that are right on), and contains a lot of useful information on translating idiomatic constructions. Many times you can apply the way idioms are put together to other things that you are trying to say. Some of the reviewers on Amazon say that it also does a good job at keeping up with changes in the language.
If you want the most authoritative Spanish dictionary in the world, you want the Diccionario de la Lengua Espanola (22nd Edition) de la Real Academia Espanola (Spanish Edition). "Real Academia" means "Royal Academy", which is the group of academics in Spain who determine acceptable use of the Spanish language.
Of course, the Real Academia dictionary is a Spanish-Spanish dictionary, so that won't help you much when you are learning Spanish. And it costs several hundred dollars. All in all you are better off with Oxford Spanish Dictionary.
I have bought a lot of books to learn Spanish, some good, some not so good. The Oxford Spanish Dictionary has been with me since day one, and it is one of the few that I would not give up.
Final Thoughts
To learn Spanish you have to work hard at it. All of the good advice in the world won't be of any use to you if you don't do your part. You have to have a routine, and stick to it.
You have to be passionate about learning Spanish to be successful.
When I taught English in Ecuador, I introduced fun, controversial topics to get students to speak. I would write down the topics down on index cards, and make the students decide before they saw the topic whether they were going to agree or disagree with the statement. Then I would show them the topic, and they would have to defend the position they had chosen. Then the whole class got to talk on the topic. What topics did I use? "Ecuadorians are terrible at playing soccer." "Cats are better than dogs." "Girls are better at math than boys." You get the idea. Students who would say nothing, and I mean nothing, when they were asked to recite lists of family members in English, or colors, would become animated, raise their hand, and contribute when topics like that came up.
What are you excited about? What do you want to learn how to say? There is a way to talk about those things in Spanish! You would be surprised how fast your progress will be when you are learning to express things that are important to you. You might even forget you are speaking Spanish.
Enroll in Spanish classes, get a Spanish tutor, pick up Rocket Spanish or Rosetta Stone Spanish, pick up the Oxford Spanish Dictionary , and start learning Spanish today.
