Eric Bishop's Webpage
While it is much more common in other parts of the world, learning a second language as an American feels like a super power. It’s hard to quantify how many opportunities it can open up for you. When we set out to learn a language as an adult these days, it’s common to start with Duolingo due to its popularity, but Duolingo bores you to death by throwing words and sentences at you without ever properly explaining the grammar structure. It’s frustrating. You might end up knowing how to say words like: ‘dog’, ‘cat’, & ‘apple’ in Spanish, but after many hours of practice the most fundamental aspects of the language will remain a mystery to you.
The most important thing when starting a language is not memorizing a bunch of useless words, because a new language is not just a bunch of different words spoken with the exact same structure. Working on the vocabularly comes after fundamentally understanding the grammar.
This is why I always tell peope to look into the Language Transfer Spanish audio course as a starting point for Spanish. The course takes advantage of the commonalities between Spanish and English, both having roots in Latin, in order to help you understand how to think through the lens of Spanish. You won’t find yourself bored with memorization. Because the course is highly interactive and explains things properly, you may even find that the act of learning Spanish is really fun. The most important part of the course is that you actively participate, pausing the lesson whenever the teacher asks how to say a specific sentence and giving it a try yourself.
This course helped me tremendously when I began learning Spanish. Learning a language is very difficult, but if you can set aside even just 20-30 minutes a day to work on it, you will be surprised with how far you can progress (and by how much faster this course can teach you than Duolingo).
After you understand the grammar, it’s important to consistently practice what you’ve learned to gain confidence, fluidity, and pronunciation. Watching simple, comprehensible YouTube videos can help with your listening comprehension. For conversational practice, language-exchange apps like HelloTalk and Tandem are pretty useful, as you can start off by getting more comfortable conversing through text and audio messages in the language and it is completely free. My recommended app for expanding your vocabulary is Lingvist. What I eventually recommend is spending money on a tutoring service so you can get dedicated one-on-one practice and corrections from a qualified teacher. This is far more engaging and may be the best option if you have trouble studying alone. There are options for this like Italki and Baselang, but the best service I’ve used in terms of value and quality is WorldsAcross.com. Using multiple outlets to learn will give you more variety in your practice, and help you round out your weaknesses in the language.