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

So you want to learn Spanish, but you’re not sure where to start. I can help with that… hey, that rhymed! Spanish was the first foreign language that I ever learned, and looking back now, I realized that I had no idea what I was doing. at all. that’s why when people ask me for Spanish learning tips, I honestly cannot recommend anything that I did, because I feel like I went about things the wrong way. so I can only speak on my own mistakes so you don’t do the same. I mean, I’m fluent now– I’ve traveled to three Spanish-speaking countries, four if you include the fact that I grew up in Florida. I’ve taken literature and history classes in Spanish, I taught Spanish for 2 years, I’ve done research and conference presentations in Spanish, I was even a journalistic translator in Spanish for over a year, so yes I’m fluent. but knowing what I know now, I would have gone about things completely differently. so let’s talk about it! so the first thing I would do if I was to start learning Spanish from zero is to speak from day one, which is kind of a controversial opinion, and I have never understood why. and I don’t mean trying to have a conversation from day one, because obviously that’s not going to work. I just mean trying out the language in small bits and kind of like, working your way up as you go. so for example, once you learn the alphabet, you’re confident with the alphabet, you can start trying out conversational phrases. even if all you know how to say is: or:, it’s better than nothing. I think it just trains your brain to be more comfortable from day one, because I think a lot of people have this mentality of like, "oh, I need to get to a certain point before I start speaking," but that’s really not true. like, you are your own worst critic, and by your own standards, you’re never going to be at the point where you’re completely comfortable to start speaking. because speaking is all about going outside of your comfort zone, so you’re never going to be like, "okay I’m ready now." you’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to sound silly sometimes, you’re going to say: instead of: and that’s just a fact of life. so get comfortable speaking now. don’t put it off, just try it out in small chunks and build up your endurance as you go. and another part of speaking from day one is talking to yourself. I would have done this a lot more. I did talk to myself, but honestly, I don’t think I did it enough. I was so scared to speak Spanish, and I feel like talking to yourself — whether that’s at home in the shower or on your way to the bus stop in the morning, it’s just a really good practice to kind of get your words out without any judgment. and I would have recorded myself more. I think this is something that nobody wants to do, but it’s so beneficial for so many reasons. like yes, listening back to your voice can be kind of cringey, but you kind of need to get comfortable with that amount of embarrassment, because there’s going to be other embarrassing moments in your Spanish learning journey. so think of it like controlled embarrassment, because nobody else is going to see these videos, nobody’s going to hear these recordings, it’s just for you to get your footing, try things out in the language, experiment, you know? also, talking to yourself can prepare you to have conversations with natives because now something that I do is like, I’ll have full-on conversations with myself. both sides. and something else I should have done is talk to natives sooner. you need that exposure as early on as you can get it, honestly. you know, once you start feeling more confident after a while, you can start taking online speaking lessons. and I think this is a thing that more people are getting into nowadays, but when I started learning Spanish — when I was like, 14, so that’s 9 years ago — this wasn’t really too big of a concept yet. but now there’s so many platforms that you can do this on. platforms like italki, Lingoda, Preply. so with the knowledge that I have now, I would have said to Elysse when she started learning Spanish, "okay, you’re still a beginner, but why not commit to taking a 30 or 45 minute lesson every single week, you know?" something to just exercise what you’ve learned, have somebody correct mistakes, hear real native speech, and maybe practice your pronunciation. because let’s be real: now next, something I would have considered doing sooner is starting to speak a specific dialect. I speak a specific dialect now, I speak Mexican Spanish. but for the first 5 years of my Spanish learning journey, I was just a Spanish generalist. I just didn’t speak anything specific. there’s pros and cons to it, because honestly, on the one hand, yes, you can understand and be understood by more people, but at the same time, if you’re a Spanish generalist, that means that there’s a million ways to say everything, and your Spanish is going to be like a weird kind of quilt. no native speaker speaks like that, you know? they use words from their specific region. and there’s just a lot of extra noise, so learning one specific dialect drowns out all of that extra noise. I would say that that’s the biggest advantage to learning a dialect, is that it simplifies the process a lot. because you’re not having to like learn five words for one thing you know there’s chaqueta, but there’s also chamarra and campera. I don’t know, you know? there’s multiple ways to say every single thing, so you might as well just learn one way and stick to it. and it’s really not a big deal to not understand and be understood by every single country, because not even native speakers have that experience. if a person from Venezuela travels to Spain, they’re going to have differences in vocabulary and pronunciation, but at the end of the day they’re going to understand each other. so you’re essentially just joining the native speaker club by learning a specific dialect. and it’s a kind of cool experience because when I talk to native speakers from a country other than Mexico, they’re like.. you sound so Mexican. and then we kind of have a laugh about it, you know? the only way I can describe the process of learning a dialect is that you don’t pick the Spanish dialect, the Spanish dialect picks you. and that’s just because we all come from different walks of life. we have different interests, we know different people. I chose Mexican Spanish because I fell in love with the country after I traveled there for the first time, and 5 years later I’m still kicking it. I know people, though, that are learning Colombian Spanish because they have a Colombian boyfriend or girlfriend, or people that are learning Puerto Rican Spanish because they really like Bad Bunny’s music. so just expose yourself to different countries and let it come to you. now the next thing I would have done differently is learn through stories. and there’s two ways you can do this, you know, obviously through books or short story books, or through story podcasts, which is actually my preferred way. it’s because it helps you learn words in context, you know? like there’s a conversation, there’s a plot, there’s characters, and the words in the Spanish that you learn from a story — it’s going to live in your brain because you remember it in the context of a larger imagery, if that makes sense. it’s not just a random word floating around in your head, you know? it’s attached to something else. there are a lot of Spanish story podcasts on Spotify, there’s Duolingo Stories podcast. but one thing that I learned stories with for Spanish — and I’m never going back — is Jiveworld. Jiveworld is the perfect listening app for people studying Spanish by themselves. and for full transparency, I actually work at Jiveworld. but that is how I know it’s the real deal, okay? don’t click away. I’m literally helping to build the app because I do believe in it so much. but basically, the idea is to learn Spanish through stories, and these are stories by the award-winning Radio Ambulante podcast by NPR. on the app, there are over 100 stories in natural, native Spanish from over 20 Spanish speaking countries. so you really are learning Spanish in its full color. and on the app, there are a lot of features and tools to make what would normally be challenging, native speech a lot more accessible. there are vocab hints all throughout the story, there are speed controls if you want to slow down the audio, there’s a full transcript and full English translation if you absolutely need it, and what I love most about the transcript is you can choose how many words you want to see. so you can see all of the words, you can see only some of the trickier words, or none at all if you want a real challenge. and although Jiveworld is most ideal for intermediate Spanish speakers, these tools can help make the language like a lot more accessible for beginners to start testing the waters as well. I always say that when you’re starting to learn a language, you shouldn’t just listen to slow-speak where you understand everything. it’s really beneficial to balance that out with real, native speech because it kind of trains your ear and keeps the end goal in mind as well. anyways, if you’re not sold already, Jiveworld just launched a new feature that you absolutely cannot say no to, and that is Soundbites. so these are mini-lessons that take just 4 minutes to do, and they really teach you the best of the language, like idioms, accents, culture, so much more. first you start off with the challenge, and then you listen to an excerpt from one of Jiveworld’s stories. and then when you think you have the answer, you can hit reveal to see how you did. but you will get hooked, because these are seriously so fun to do, honestly. so if you’re ready to break through to real Spanish, click the link down in the description to get started with Soundbites. get ready to get fluent, my friend. now, the next thing that I did wrong when I was learning Spanish is that I obsessed over grammar, specifically tenses and conjugations, Spanish grammar can be really intimidating coming from an English-speaking perspective because of things like the pronouns and the subjunctive and things like that. but I think that the one thing that everybody can agree on is kind of the most challenging for a lot of Spanish learners is conjugations, like verb tenses and verb conjugations. so what a lot of people do is they either avoid it and never study it, which also isn’t good, or they overcompensate and study it way too much. don’t obsess over all the tenses, you don’t need to. it’s just going to make you miserable, you know? we panic because we think we have to master them all to understand everything in Spanish, but you really don’t need to. forget all that bullsh*t. to survive, like, 50 to 60% of Spanish conversations, I’m going to tell you what to do, okay? get a list of like, 20 to 30 most common verbs in Spanish and learn how to conjugate them in these following tenses. the present tense, so for example, yo como. "I eat." the past simple tense, so for example yo comí. "I ate." and this isn’t really a tense, but learn how to construct the gerund. so this is the equivalent of English, like walking, eating. I said those backwards, but you get it. these are useful and necessary to build the continuous tenses, so to say things like, you know, I am eating or I am walking. so yeah, regarding tenses, that’s probably the most pressure for grammar that I would put on myself in like the first year. I don’t know how fast of a learner you are, but that’s on the really relaxed side, I feel like. now let’s talk vocab! I have a couple of vocab tips, and they’re good ones. don’t try to learn every word that you encounter and don’t know. it is a waste of time. your brain, it’s just a fact that your brain is not going to be able to recall every single word that you come into contact with. so you might as well save that room for the words that you’re actually going to use. the words that are relevant to you for vocabulary in any language. I usually take what’s called — what I call — a need-based approach. so when I encounter a new word, right — and I don’t know it — I will pause for a moment and I will resist that, like, gorilla-brain urge to instinctively just write it down, cuz like, NEW WORD NEW WORD don’t do that, okay? I will pause for a moment and I will try to picture myself using that word. picture a situation where I’ll need that word. if I can’t picture that word being useful or relevant to me in the pretty near future, I will leave it for that moment. if it’s like, a super-specific word relating to like, science or law or something like that, and it’s not really relevant to me, I will leave it for the moment. think of it like, you’re putting a word on hold. now, if you’ve seen the word again and again after you initially do put it on hold, that does mean that it occurs more frequently in the language, so don’t ignore it if it is everywhere. but you know, just use good common sense and don’t go crazy. also, it’s important to note that there is a difference between active and passive vocabulary. for example, a word that I see all the time and I understand, but I never really use, is like a word like martillo, which means hammer. that’s an example of passive vocabulary. so my passive vocabulary is a lot bigger and diverse probably than my active vocabulary, like the words that I actually reach for on an everyday basis. now, still talking about vocab, another thing that I should have done that didn’t occur to me till way later was learning vocabulary by category or topic. when I first started learning Spanish, my vocab was all over the place. it was like, random household objects, but also conversational phrases, and also body parts? you could be like, "okay, this week I’m going to learn everything there is to know about, like, family vocabulary." so you learn sobrino, you learn abuelo, you learn hermana. then, the next week, "okay, this week I’m going to learn travel words and countries." you do you. whatever topics or whatever categories are relevant to you and you want to learn about, choose a different category every week. or every day, I don’t — I don’t really know. it depends on your routine. but you know, vary the categories. now, this last thing that I did wrong is actually something that the majority of people do, and they don’t realize how detrimental it is, and that is studying Spanish in high school. I’m talking specifically, like, in the context of the United States. I don’t know about other countries, but boy can I speak for the experience here. in my experience, I only took a Spanish class when I was pretty much already like at a B1 or B2 level, maybe when I was like 18. so I was a senior. I was like you know what, f*** it, let’s just take a Spanish class and see what happens. oh my God, worst experience in my life. and especially because I was already self-studying before, so I already had a reference and an idea about how I like to learn. and it was just like, the antithesis of that, you know? it’s a huge influx of vocab, there’s tests every single week, the learning isn’t personalized because you’re in that class with like 20 other people, it’s a super un-stimulating, demotivating experience because it’s just — I’m just talking sh*t at this point. so what I would say to do is to self-study it, and then if you want to study it in university, do it there instead. that was like, a much better experience. that’s what I did, so I self-studied, I got to university, I basically already had a fluent level, so I tested in, and they were like, "okay, you really don’t need to learn Spanish anymore, so we’re just going to put you in these courses that native Spanish speakers take, like cinema, history, literature." and that was really, really like, enriching and a great experience for me to get my first.. I don’t know, like, real world kind of Spanish experience. Cuz up until then, it was always just like, me with a notebook in my room. so my friends, that is everything I would do differently if I could learn Spanish over again in this day and age. and I would. I would do it a million times over, because Spanish is the love of my life, it’s like, one of my biggest passions. it’s my best friend, it’s everything. if you’re also fluent in Spanish and you regret anything about the way that you learned, or maybe, like, misconceptions that you had before you started learning, also leave those down in the comments. cuz I’m kind of curious about this collective Spanish trauma that we have. if you like the video, make sure to give it a thumbs up and subscribe, share it with a friend who’s also learning Spanish! okay, bye …