Faq
"I have a trip to [Spanish-speaking country] and I want to be able to survive"¶
Minimum investment: 1 week
Download and install Duolingo and configure it for travel. Duolingo has a very gentle introduction to Spanish that equips you with basic phrases that will help you navigate your travels.
I want to be able to make friends in with Spanish-speaking locals and have basic conversations and interactions¶
Minimum investment: 2 months
You basically have two options: 1. Take a short-term intensive class on Spanish speaking. This emphasizes more speaking at the expense of listening 2. Follow the TMW method but begin outputting early on. This emphasizes more listening at the expense of speaking.
Bonus tip: learning how to be social and friendly is going to be very helpful for making friends
I want to be able to speak comfortably and fluently¶
Minimum investment: 12 months
Read along and follow this guide.
The shortcomings of other learning methods¶
Roughly ranked from worst to best
Duolingo¶
Duolingo is one of the most gentle ways to dip your feet into language learning, and it rewards you into feeling like you're making consistent progress. Many peolple who learn Spanish through Duolingo do so because they live busy lives, believing they can make steady progress in learning Spanish on 15 mins a day. The reality is that the progress and skills you learn in Duolingo don't transfer well to real-life. You might be able to pick out what Spanish word corresponds to "apple" from a word bank, but when you're trying to say "apple" in a real life conversation, there won't be a word bank there with you. No matter how efficient you are, 15 mins a day is reviewing what you know at best and a waste of 15 mins at the worse. However, the reality is that 15 mins is what most people are willing to spend a day learning a new language, and in a way, this is what you can accomplish in 15 mins a day, which is not much.
Summary:
- Easiest way to get into language learning. Easiest way to trick yourself into thinking you're learning.
- Content is very construed and limited. It is classroom learning and not what you would experience if you interacted with real, native content.
- You can't go at your own pace. Duolingo limits the amount of stuff you can learn a day.
- Many of the exercises are useless in actually improving your Spanish-abilities in real-world scenarios
- The skills you learn have very little transference in real world.
- A lot of the useful features like removing ads and being able to skip lessons are locked behind a paywall.
Classrooms¶
The variability of quality of Spanish classes are quite wide. I believe Spanish classes could be play a helpful role in learning Spanish, but I've seen so many classes fall into spending time on things that don't improve, or even actively harm, Spanish skills.
Good uses of class: - Introducing and explaining grammar points - Motivating students through learning about culture - Accountability
Bad uses of classroom time: - Conjugation exercises geared toward speaking: the reality is that there are too many ways to conjugate spanish verbs such that it's infeasible to memorize conjugation tables. The smart students who are able to accomplish such a feat will speak Spanish formulaicly, which is to say they will pause mid-sentence to conjugate the verbs. Fluent Spanish speakers don't conjugate. They just know what they want to say and it feels like the words just conjugate themselves, similar to how native English speakers rarely have to think about conjugating -- for example in past tense when to add a 'd' (hated) and when to add an 'ed' (batted) and when it's neither (slept). - Speaking practice: this isn't so bad in Spanish, but it's worth recognizing that practicing speaking with non-native speakers can create some bad outcomes. Many non-native speakers can't pick up on native accents, can't understand natural speech or slang, and will speak bad Spanish themselves. This means if you want to make yourself understood in speaking practice, you will have to speak with a foreign accent, stick to classroom or constructed sentences, and listen to bad Spanish.
Summary
- No personalization, the class often moves at the pace of the slowest student
- If you're practicing speaking and listening with other students, you're going to develop bad habits.
Private tutors¶
Private tutors may be a great way to learn Spanish
- eue
- Can be prohibitively expensive. You need about 600-900 hours of classroom learning to be proficient in Spanish.