how I would learn Spanish (if I could start over)

hello everyone welcome back today we’re going to be talking about all of my mistakes that I have made in studying Spanish I have been studying Spanish now for six years oh my God I feel old I feel like there’s so many things that if I could go back in time and do differently I would so I’m going to share them with you guys today but please keep in mind these are like personal things that I would do differently it’s not objectively better than what I did before because I already know some of the things I’m gonna say people are going to be like no so the first thing that I would do differently is I would learn vocabulary completely differently I would start with more specific vocab to my life because when I first started learning Spanish I started learning all the colors every single type of family member you can have every single occupation out there and I didn’t even know how to like explain what kind of subject I studied in school and like what we did there day to day like I had all this vocab that I didn’t need and I didn’t have the vocab that I did need and this even kind of passed on to when I was more in an intermediate level because I got to a point where I knew all the basic vocab and I was kind of just like getting a lot of vocab from movies and vocab was still useful but for example I realized at a point that I didn’t even know how to say Gap year and I had been on my Gap year for like three months at that point which was crazy because it was like such a huge part of my life in that moment and I couldn’t even talk about it so what I would advise you guys to do is if you feel like I don’t know what specific vocab was to me I would honestly turn on the like voice recording app on your phone and just set a timer for like 15 minutes and just like speak about your life speak about what’s going on speak about your hobbies I don’t know you can even do this a few times and like do specific topics each time listen back through that and just pause it every time that you’re like oh I don’t know this word in Spanish or like your target language and then you’re slowly gonna get a vocab list specifically for you I really wish I had done that earlier because I started doing that now like now once in a while I’ll just like set a timer and speak in Spanish Non-Stop and I really noticed the words that I’m missing like there’s always a lot of words that are for me very common in my life but words that in Spanish I never knew that is the first thing I would do differently the second thing is this is gonna be controversial guys please don’t come at me I personally wish that I chose a specific country’s accent slang earlier on because my accent and slang situation is very weird like my accent is not from any specific country basically in majority of Spain they speak with a lisp so instead of saying policia they say polyfia but I don’t say that my accent is more similar to The Latin American accent but in a lot of country I know also not every single country but in a lot of the Latin American countries they also kind of dropped their s’s so like not all of them once again that’s what I’m saying don’t come at me because I know it’s not all of them but my accent is like I pronounce every single syllable but the slang that I’m speaking speaking in is Spanish slang when you listen to me speak based on the words I say like it sounds like I’m I learned Spanish in Spain because I say sometimes I’ll say like Kuro instead of trabajo oh my God I forgot how to say literally because I kind of use the Spanish version more but based on my accent I don’t sound like I’m from Spain I mean obviously I don’t sound like I’m native but also it doesn’t sound like I learned Spanish in Spain or another thing for example in Spain they use the vosotros form instead of ustedes but I didn’t learn Spanish with the vosotros form so I use ustedes so for me it’s just like it’s so mixed it’s so confusing like I speak with Spanish slime but my accent is not Spanish at all and for me I know that nobody cares but for me it really irks me I really wish I just stuck with one and I know that there’s nothing wrong with that but for me it kind of makes me confused and it makes people confused when they speak to me so personally I would pick a country early on and focus on their slime because another thing that I just want to mention I I really did not want to focus on learning a lot of slang because when I was studying Spanish living in Ireland and living in the UK I really was like look I don’t want to focus on one specific country because I just want to like travel I want to use Spanish in any country and if I stick to one country’s slang I’m gonna feel limited as soon as I move to Spain obviously this is an over exaggeration but it genuinely felt like 50 of the words they were saying was slang I felt like I know so much Spanish and I don’t know anything they’re saying so I had always regretted not studying this long earlier but the reason I’m saying is controversial is because I think a lot of people learn Spanish to be able to travel everywhere so it wouldn’t make sense to learn one country slang but if you know you’re going to be in one country more than the other I would honestly tell my old self to just focus on that country slang so actually tying in with that I want to talk about today’s sponsor lingo pie so if you’ve never heard about lingo pad before I’ve talked about them many times on my channel I feel like it’s honestly an amazing resource for language Learners it is a subscription-based video on-demand platform and it basically has a lot of like TV shows movies it’s like a language Learners Netflix and it’s incredible for example if you’re learning Spanish you can get subtitles in both Spanish and English you can turn one or the other off so if you just want to see Spanish if you just want to see English you can also do like a mashup of them which is really cool so you can basically get English subtitles with like a few Spanish words thrown in there to kind of like make you learn a few words at a time another thing that I love is that if you press on a word that you don’t know first of all a little thing will pop up to kind of tell you what the word means how is it used the translation of it basically and when you do that it’s going to be automatically added to a flashcard deck which you can then study after watching the episode of the movie or whatever you’re watching this is incredible because it saves so many steps like you don’t have to like watch your movie pause it write down the word find the translation make a flash card do that all again every few seconds like in this case scenario you just press on a word okay that’s the word it automatically goes in your flashcard deck and you just smoothly learn like that you can also see all your transcripts on the side and you can just like follow along and the reason that I’m mentioning it in this tip is because lingo Pie has this option to basically see kind of like what country that TV show was filmed in so for example if I want to watch specifically TV shows from Spain then I can see all the TV shows and movies that were filmed in Spain so they have Spanish slang Spanish accent and I find that it is extremely useful so if you have a specific Spanish accent that you want to focus on like Argentinian Spanish you will have choice because you will be able to see a little Vlog and that is honestly my favorite favorite feature of theirs like that’s not even the main feature but it’s one of my favorites so if you want to check out lingo pie all the links will be in the description and let’s move on thank you lingo pipe for sponsoring this video the next tip that I have is not tip I keep saying tips Guys these are not tips this is me speaking to my old self okay third thing I would tell myself is to speak right from the start I don’t care if you know 50 words like speak right from the start I have noticed that my favorite favorite way to study is by setting it I already literally mentioned this to me minutes ago setting a timer and just speaking right and then through speaking you will realize kind of what vocab what grammar points you’re missing when you’re a beginner you’re kind of like how can I do that like I can’t even talk for five minutes like how do you expect me to do 15 minutes as a beginner you should be able to do even one minute even if that one minute is like hello how are you my name is Anna this is my age like this is the color of my hair whatever you should be able to do one minute from the first week of learning right because it’s just a few sentences so start with that and build on it keep setting a timer for one minute say what you usually say and then just add in an extra sentence I don’t know if you’re talking about like oh I have brown hair add in the fact that it’s like long or I don’t know like whatever you want to but you just slowly add up add up add up and slowly build your way up to 15 minutes so you can start with one minute once you feel like oh I can easily talk for one minute go up to two once you feel comfortable that go up to three like it’s almost like a fun game it’s like you’re literally leveling up in the beginning when you first start learning a language one minute is hard like 15 minutes you can’t even picture speaking in that language for 15 minutes so that way you slowly level up but even after one week of learning you should be able to do one minute so I really regret not having done that earlier because that way first of all I would have found my specific vocabulary much quicker and vocab with specific context of what’s going on in my life and second of all I would have prioritized speaking right from the start and it wouldn’t have been such like a comprehension game just like oh do you understand this do you understand this can you write an essay on this it would have been more exciting because it you I would have realized more like oh I’m speaking a language like I can speak to another human so yeah I would honestly say do it from the start it’s fine if you’ve been learning language for a week set a timer for 30 seconds like start slow but start and make it a habit and work your way up if anything you can even write down the date that you know you like raise the time and like started doing this exercise for longer like you can literally make a game out of it my next thing is I wish I did not buy so many grammar books and I honestly just wish I studied with studyspanish.com I wrote it down there because I always forget the name of the website it’s so simple and I forget it basically this is not like if I’m not affiliated with them in any way but I genuinely think this website has every single basic grammar point you would get in like a basic Spanish grammar book so I’m like it doesn’t make sense to buy all these grammar books when more or less they all kind of say the same thing obviously when it gets to a more advanced level like I wouldn’t recommend using this website I just wish that I started with that I wish that as a beginner as an intermediate level learner maybe even I didn’t buy a grammar book until I had every grammar point on that website learned all the really basic grammar points are covered there every single topic they have they have like five quizzes on it so to be honest I think it’s even more than a grammar book because you’re getting all the exercises and you’re getting all the grammar points you’re getting examples there’s even like some kind of oral tests the only con of this is I think for every grammar point one or two tests are free but then like the other four are like paid for but if you want to do it for free every single chapter has one or two tests for free I would personally invest into it if I was a beginner and I found this website but I wish I just learned with this website I feel like it would have saved me so much time once again like I could have just went step by step like said like hey this month I’m gonna do 10 of these lessons and that’s it like I don’t have to bring a grammar book with me it would make life simpler I honestly wish I had just studied with this website in the beginning and then once I got more intermediate more advanced I could buy some like grammar books with more complex things Concepts not things the next thing I would tell myself is when reading a book do not stop every single second to write down every single word you don’t know I still get so tempted by this because whenever I’m reading a book and I don’t know a word like I can’t just gloss over it because I’m just like I want to know what it means but I find that you really lose the flow of reading and then it’s like you lose the whole point of reading you’re losing kind of the momentum of reading eating and like two pages in you’re gonna get tired you’re not even gonna wanna keep reading anymore you might be thinking like no but if I skip words I’m gonna like skip out on so much value and like I don’t want that I want to learn all these words but in the long run you’re probably gonna not finish your book some people study well that way and this is just like a personal opinion but for me I noticed that whenever I write down every single word I get past two pages and I’m done because literally I’m done like I’m tired I’ve written down like a hundred words I’m overwhelmed but when I just read naturally and just like I will look up a word every once in a while if it’s like completely I don’t understand even the context of what’s going on that really doesn’t stop my flow and I’m more likely to like finish a whole chapter so that’s just something I would say to myself personally but that’s also like personal preference I don’t know the next thing is also kind of related and it is to read out loud when you’re reading I used to just read in like Circle words that I don’t know but I feel like for me reading out loud is really really important because I’ve noticed that with Spanish even though I think my pronunciation is pretty good I can stutter once in a while which is completely fine sometimes I even stutter in English but I sometimes stutter because the sounds are not the same in English obviously so it’s almost kind of hard for my brain for some letters to go together so I don’t really know how to explain it in my last language learning Vlog I showed myself doing this and you could even see me stutter once in a while because sometimes there was just sounds that in English you wouldn’t get together so I feel like reading out loud honestly helps me a lot and every single time I do it I notice that the next day I speak very clearly and very well so I feel like if I started doing this from the start like even if I didn’t understand a book just like 10 minutes of reading even if I don’t know anything that’s written down on that page it will really increase your ability to speak it more easily and like you’re gonna be less likely to stutter when you’re speaking you’re going to feel more comfortable as well you’re gonna be used to hearing your voice in that language so when you’re speaking to another person who is the native speaker of that language you’re not going to feel as self-conscious because it’s not like them hearing you speak for the first time and also you’re hearing yourself for the first time because you never speak out loud it’s like at this point you would have heard yourself speak so many times that to you it’s like normal you know so I really wish I had done that earlier the next thing I feel like a lot of these are like very similar if you’re going to learn lyrics from songs be picky with what songs because I feel like I wasn’t very picky in the beginning like I used to choose a lot of reggaeton songs to learn Spanish with and when I moved to Spain I realized I mean I knew that reggaeton was coming from Latin America and basically no region is from Spain ever but the salon used in those songs is very different to Spain Spanish a lot of the words I would learn from that would not be equivalent so for example even the word I remember uh in some songs I would hear the word and they have very different meanings so whenever they people used to sing about it I was like this doesn’t make any sense in Spain means to like take something to grab something whereas in Latin America it means a little bit of a different meaning I mean it’s not just because of that but in general if you know that you’re learning like Spain Spanish for example try to choose artists from Spain specifically because songs are more artistic and creative and more conversational rather than grammatically correct so you’re going to be getting a lot of slime like most of your words probably will be slime and if all of that slang is from a different country it’s gonna be like you’re not gonna use it probably the next thing that I would say to myself is if you can afford it take italki lessons earlier not traditional traditional classroom style classes there’s like a few classroom style classes that I think are done extremely well like for example lingoda I think it’s done extremely well I don’t think I would ever just go back to like a school style Academy to learn a language for like in a group of like 10 people I don’t know like I I don’t really see myself doing that unless it’s some sort of like experience on purpose like I’d go to a different country to like do that for a few weeks I feel like you don’t like learning it so traditionally is the same way that we learn languages in school and as we all know most of the languages we learn in school like we don’t pick them up well because they’re not taught efficient like they’re not taught in a way that you’re gonna remember it so I feel like when I wanted to improve my Spanish I remember I would keep like searching for all these classes that I could attend and I realized that I could have saved myself so much time if I had just booked a few italki lessons because those conversational lessons like I learned so much from even just 30 minutes with talking with someone this is also a personal preference and like your ways of learning but personally I wish I had prioritized italki type of classes rather than like traditional style classroom teaching the next thing I would say is to really take advantage of the easy Spanish YouTube channel but I honestly think they’re extremely extremely useful and right now the easy Spanish Channel I think they have over 300 uploads so more or less each video is like more or less 10 min minutes so if you literally just like tried to watch a video a day for a year your Spanish would grow like crazy first of all you’re getting so much slang you’re getting natural native pronunciation not like you know Duolingo like you’re also hearing kind of the intonation of how they speak the speed of how they speak and that is extremely extremely important it’s I think I realized this year and it’s crazy that I only realized this year but I realized that Spanish is so much more about your Rhythm and intonation than your actual accent my accent is pretty good pretty okay but my rhythm is off and I feel like that’s the main reason why I always like give myself away as a foreigner that’s how people notice that it’s not my first language I mean I’m not saying my accent is not good but my rhythm is really bad so I think that’s the first thing that gives it away so with easy Spanish like you can do so many things you can either like take down vocab you can either like repeat what they’re saying and practice your pronunciation with them you can like mimic their accent like in a nice way obviously don’t do this in real life with people in front of you but like if you’re watching a video of course you can like mimic their accent I once again I’m not in any way connected to them like never spoke to any of them I just genuinely think it’s such a good resource and I really wish I’d used it earlier on and the last thing we have this is kind of like a small one but if you know a specific country where you’re going to be living like for example I knew that I was gonna be moving to Spain or for example I don’t know if you know that you’re going to be visiting Mexico a lot then I would say to watch some iconic TV shows in that area I can’t give like a valid reason but for me like when I was writing the kind of tips like what I would do differently for this video this was one of the first things that came to mind I was like I really wish that like I had just researched or like asked my cousin or something what are some like iconic shows like iconic shows that every spun yard has seen like what what is like an iconic show in Spain there’s a TV show called Aquino Akin Viva I mean I know I feel like someone’s gonna I’m gonna say something like yeah everyone in Spain has seen that show and someone’s got a comment and be like I’ve never heard of it but it’s a very very iconic sitcom show there are hundreds of episodes and every episode is an hour long if I watched an episode a day I would have learned so so so much and I would have gotten so much cultural context as well before coming here and once again slang I never realized until I moved here how important it was to understand slime I’m sorry but it is if the place you’re going to or if the place you’re planning to visit to and like learn Spanish there if they have strong slime it’s important to learn it because they’re going to be using it a lot and you’re gonna feel lost I’m just speaking from my experience I had a lot of moments where I just did not know what anyone was talking about and sometimes there’s words that I don’t even get from context because they can like say a sentence and like it’s four words and three of them are slang and I’m like all I understood was s like now I’m doing better but in the beginning it was definitely a little difficult but yeah these these are all things I would do differently if I could start from scratch I hope you guys took something away from this once again a reminder these are not like objectively better things and like don’t do this but do this instead but just me speaking with my younger self and like trying to save myself for some time so yeah I hope you guys enjoyed this video I love you all I wish you luck on your Spanish learning Journeys and yeah adios [Music] …