The 5 Best French Canadian TV Shows to Master Your Language Skills
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Spanish is a major language that is spoken all over the world. It is also a beautiful language that reflects the wealth of history and culture of the Spanish speaking worlds.
The reasons that people want to learn basic Spanish may vary. Some may want to travel to Spain or do business in Mexico while others just love salsa music, but one thing that most of them have in common is that they want to learn Spanish quickly.
In this post, we are going to provide you with five tips on how to learn Spanish quickly and efficiently. Go through them to figure out how you can begin your Spanish language journey.
1. Study Spanish in a Spanish-speaking country
One of the quickest ways to gain fluency in a language is to immerse yourself in it. This means that you surround yourself with the language and allow yourself to experience it over an extensive period of time.
Of course, one of the most efficient ways to ensure that you are immersed in the Spanish language is to take a trip to either Spain, or another part of the world where Spanish is spoken daily.
We’re not just suggesting hopping in a plane with a phrase book, you might gain some rudimentary language skills that way but you will not really learn Spanish.
If you want to learn Spanish fluently by traveling to a Spanish-speaking country, you need to travel there to STUDY. Find or join a tour that is meant specifically for language learners or travel to Spain or another Spanish-speaking country to take a Spanish language course.
You can probably find these types of tours by talking to your Spanish consulate or by contacting the Institute Cervantes.
2. Study Spanish with a native language tutor
The reason why immersion trips work so well is because it ensures that you practice the language every day. As you are surrounded by Spanish language speakers, you have no choice but to think and speak in Spanish, practicing what you learned.
Not everyone, however, has the time or the means to just drop everything to go to another country for several months just to learn a language. In this case, the best Spanish learning program to be involved in is one where you take lessons with a native language speaker.
An online native tutoring service like JustLearn allows Spanish language learners to take classes with some of the best Spanish learning tutors out there. Because the sessions are one-on-one, learners can set their own learning schedule so they can learn Spanish at their convenience.
Regularly working with a native language tutor ensures that you are spending several hours a week interacting with a Spanish speaker, immersing yourself in the language much like you would if you travelled to a Spanish speaking country.
The advantage of working with a tutor, instead of trying to study to learn on your own, is that you have someone there who can provide on the spot correction or encouragement. They are also available to help you work out any questions you might have about grammar or vocabulary in real time.
3. Find Spanish language learning Podcasts and YouTube
These are basically the best answers to how to learn Spanish quickly for free. As long as you have an internet, a computer, or a mobile device, you can use one of these three things to learn Spanish.
Learn Spanish YouTube channels is a good way to learn the basics of Spanish grammar and even improve you Spanish vocabulary. Meanwhile, Spanish language YouTube content is a great way to improve your conversational Spanish. Watching news programs or comedy clips or music videos in Spanish can help you immerse yourself in the language and get a better idea of how native Spanish speakers really talk to one another.
Language learning podcasts are also a good way to learn basic Spanish. Most podcasts focused on learning Spanish provide short lessons, sometimes as short as three to five minutes, that you can listen to in your spare time.
One advantage that podcasts have over YouTube is that you can download podcasts on your mobile device. This means that you can listen to them even if you don’t have access to the internet. Podcasts can be listened to on the go and – because they are short – are easy to repeat, allowing you to absorb the lessons over time. This can be one of the best ways to learn Spanish on your own.
4. Take every opportunity to build up your vocabulary
Yes, memorizing vocabulary lists can sound dull, but it’s actually very important. Unless you have a sizable store of Spanish words that you recognize and know the meanings of, you won’t be able to understand much less use the language.
The more words you learn, the better your chances of understanding what a native Spanish speaker is saying.
Here’s an interesting fact that might explain why building your Spanish vocabulary can help you learn the language quickly. There are around 1,000 to 2,000 frequently used Spanish words. So, if you know 1,000 to 2,000 words, you can understand about 70% to 90% of a conversation held in Spanish.
As we noted, memorizing vocabulary words tends to be a task that language learners – be they trying to learn Spanish or any other language – dread. It seems so dull! Well here are a few tips to learn Spanish faster by making vocabulary word memorization a little more fun.
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Try to create your own flash cards. Instead of just going through a list over and over again, place the words on the list on flash cards.
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Read Spanish materials – newspapers, short stories, magazine articles, even novels. While you go through them, take note of the words you don’t understand and add them to your vocabulary list or flash cards. If you can find the Spanish version of your favorite short story, it could help or, you could find Spanish children’s books and read those as well.
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Listen to Spanish music. Again, don’t necessarily try and understand everything, just try and pick out words and put them on your vocabulary list.
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When watching Spanish language content on YouTube or listening to podcasts, listen to the whole thing at least once with the intent to just pick out the words that are new to you. Put them on a list and find the meanings before listening or watching the Podcast or the YouTube video again.
5. Watch Spanish movies and TV series
This is another way that you can immerse yourself in the Spanish language without having to travel abroad yet.
While some cable providers may have channels from Spain or other Spanish speaking countries, the advent of streaming services makes it easier than ever to find and watch Spanish films and TV series.
Watching movies and TV series in Spanish can help you gain fluency as it is also another way to immerse yourself in the language. It’s also a very entertaining way to learn more about not just the Spanish language but the culture and history as well.
You will hear Spanish speakers having actual conversations and can also pick up some new and interesting slang words and phrases. Also, if you watch content from other regions, such as Mexico or Puerto Rico or Brazil, it will help you get a feel of the different regional variations of Spanish.
Two major features of streaming services that Spanish language learners should take advantage of is the ability to rewind and the ability to add subtitles.
Being able to rewind or go back to a specific part of an episode can help you understand what is going on better. The same goes for subtitles.
While you should watch with Spanish audio and try to concentrate on that, having subtitles in your native language that you can occasionally glance at can help you understand what is going on better.
Conclusion
The key to learning Spanish quickly is really immersion in the Spanish language. You need to provide yourself with opportunities to hear native speakers in order to truly grasp how the language is used to communicate.
However, you can’t just stop at listening to Spanish speakers; you need to give yourself a chance to interact with them. Having regular conversations with Spanish speakers is the only real way to gain enough fluency to state with confidence that: I know Spanish.
This is why working with a Spanish language tutor is one of the quickest and fastest ways to learn Spanish. It ensures that, even if it only takes an hour each day, you are practicing your Spanish language conversational skills with a native speaker.
