I get the appeal: sounds like fun, makes sense on the surface, get a little cultured, get a little drunk, catch of a bit of clap, come back home fluent in Spanish.  However, it usually doesn’t work like that (fun-drinking-STDs yes, fluent in Spanish, no).  I say this as someone who speaks Spanish quite fluently, started learning it on their own about twelve years ago, and has since spent three months in Spain and eight months in Latin America (three in Colombia and five in Chile). 

I advise you to first learn a language from home, wherever you live (doesn’t matter where: you need an internet connection, that’s all you need), and then travel to the country where it’s spoken as a reward/vacation and/or in order to practice and refine it.  I shall now explain why.

If you speak English…

…which you do if you’re reading this, either as a native speaker or a non-native who speaks English at a fairly high level, then you’re going to have a very hard time not resorting to English to communicate.  This is especially true if you’re in some sort of school or program: most of your fellow students will also speak English, you will hang out together outside of class and therefore you will speak English most of the time that you’re not in class, and if you are going to do that why didn’t you just stay home and take a Spanish class?  It would have resulted in pretty much the same thing (Spanish in-class, English outside of class).

English is by far the most widely spoken second language throughout the world, especially in Spanish-speaking countries.  You’ll never have trouble finding someone who speaks English to help you with whatever you need and consequently it will be very difficult to avoid that temptation (or necessity, sometimes) unless you already speak fairly good Spanish.

People who have done it talk about how it doesn’t work very well…

I spent almost three months in Spain in 2015 and barely made any progress the first month because I wasn’t intentionally doing anything to make progress, and those things I did which really helped (online study, tutoring sessions, and language exchanges) were things I could’ve done at home.  This was my big takeaway from that trip: not only can you learn a language at home just as well as you can in the country where it’s spoken, it’s often easier because you’re not dealing with all issues and problems posed by traveling abroad (getting clothes washed, coordinating flights/trains/rental cars, where to get groceries, how to get tickets for this/that, how to get internet, lost/stolen passport, oh no my toilet’s broken how do I get it fixed…etc.).

I’ll tell you something else I learned from that trip: you really, really want to learn the language to a fairly decent level first (around B2 preferrably, per the CEFR scale) before you travel to the country where it’s spoken, that way you can treat it like a vacation and a reward to yourself and enjoy yourself while you’re there rather than spending all your time working on trying to learn the language.  My Spanish was probably high-B1, maybe low-B2 when I landed in Spain, and that definitely made things much easier for me, but I was still struggling the whole time to understand people and that really made my experience there less enjoyable and more stressful.  I’m to the point now where I kind of don’t want to bother travelling to a foreign country for any substantial amount of time (more than a couple of weeks) unless I’m already around C1 in the language spoken there – sounds excessive, I know, but that’s my opinion at this point.

Benny Lewis spent six months in Spain in 2003 and barely learned any Spanish at all…and he was trying to learn Spanish the whole time.  It wasn’t until he refused to speak English and insisted on intentionally studying and using Spanish every day that he started making significant progress.  He mentions meeting a lot of expats who had been there years, sometimes decades, who barely spoke the local language.  The folks over at Happy Hour Spanish and Olly Richards at I Will Teach You a Language recount similar experiences and observations.

This takes a lot of time and money and isn’t necessary

Doing a study abroad program requires a substantial investment of both time and money, in the planning as well as the actual execution while you’re there.  This is in addition to the fact that, nowadays with the internet and what we know about language-learning, it’s not only not necessary but doesn’t even offer much of an advantage over just learning the language at home.

The overwhelming majority of the things you can do to learn a language that really work well can be done from home just as well as they can from the country where your target language is spoken, sometimes better if wherever you would’ve ended up has poor internet connectivity.  Here, look:

• Interactions with native speakers where you talk to them and they help and correct you: language exchanges and tutoring sessions via video confrencing apps like Skype.
• Expose yourself to lots of media in your target language (e.g. the news in Spanish) and look up and learn what you don’t know: you can do this just as well from home as you can from anywhere because this is all done online now.
• Read newspapers, books, etc. and look up and learn new words, grammar, expressions, etc.  Same as above, plus if you insist on paper books you can get plenty of stuff in your target language online from Amazon and similar retailers.  Every newspaper has a website now and the overwhelming majority are free.
• Learn about the culture of the country where your target language is spoken which simultaneously teaches you new terms and expressions in your target language: search YouTube for videos about the cultural and historical aspects of wherever it is your interested in and I assure you that you will not be lacking for videos in your target language talking about them.  Check out my “Learn Spanish on YouTube” section for tons of good suggestions and help with this.  No, this isn’t as good as being there, not even close, I admit it, however it’s something you can do right now and which will help prepare you before you travel there.

I’m sure there’s more but that’s most of it I believe.  Regarding the last one: yes, you definitely do want to travel to the country where your target language is spoken, it does have its advantages, but that’s all: some advantages.  It’s not at all necessary anymore.  Do it, but treat it like a vacation or reward, a time when you’ll refine your target language, not when you learn it from scratch as a complete beginner.

This really won’t work unless you’ve got decent social skills

Ok, you’re going to travel to Spain/France/Mongola/wherever and learn that country’s language by interacting with the locals, going out to bars and restaurants and talking to people left and right, constantly interacting in their language thereby learning it.  Do you usually act that way at home?  Are you good at approaching strangers cold like that?  Can you make friends quickly?  Does the culture of your target country even lend itself to this (you may have trouble in German-speaking countries, for example)?

If you’re a socially awkward shut-in, this really isn’t going to work for you, this method of learning a language from scratch by traveling to where it’s spoken.  The only reason I was able to substantially improve my Spanish in Spain was because after the first month I started doing language exchanges with locals nearly every day, and the only reason I was able to do that was because one of my Spanish tutors was kind enough to point out a local website where I could post classified ads advertising that I was a native English speaker looking for people to practice Spanish with in exchange for helping them with their English, and the only reason that worked is because I was a native English speaker and English happens to be a very highly demanded second language in Spain (and almost everywhere else in the world at the moment).  I had a lot of luck, in other words.

There’s another problem: if you don’t speak the language before you go there then you won’t speak it when you get there and therefore you won’t be able to practice speaking it with the locals.  This sounds stupid but a lot of people get the idea in their head of going abroad to learn a foreign language, get there, then realize, “I don’t speak this language…I can’t practice it because I don’t speak it.  These people around me aren’t language teachers I’m paying to teach me their language, so they won’t.  Oh damn.”  You need to already speak the language at some kind of decent-ish level before you get there in order for this to work.

I have ranted enough

I have ranted enough.  You are tired of me and so am I.  My laptop’s even tired of me, the battery’s going to die in 18 minutes it tells me.  I have said enough, and I genuinely hope this helps people, despite the tone of this post.  What I really want to convey is this:

You can do it, now, from wherever you’re at, without spending much if any money.  Just start, right now.  Get a tutor or language exchange partner on iTalki, find some videos on YouTube in Spanish that interest you, sign up for an online group class (GoSpanish is great, I talk about them below), look up what you don’t know, put it in Anki, and start learning.

After six months or a year of this then you can go to Spain/Mexico/Germany/wherever and have a much, much better experience that you would have if you did it now.

If you’re learning Spanish a great way to get fluent is online group classes…

As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

Cheers,

Andrew

What this means is:

1. You need to learn those aspects of the language (words, expressions, grammar, syntax) that are in current use by native speakers.
2. You need to learn them in order of frequency of use, meaning that the most commonly used words are the most important and should be learned first, then the next most frequent, then the next most frequent, and so on.
3. The language will take care of all of this for you, presuming you expose yourself consistently to large volumes of it that originate from native speakers.

We’ll delve more deeply into each of these in a moment.

What I’m trying to say here is that you don’t need to know, beforehand, what you need to study.  You don’t need anyone else (teacher or textbook) to tell you, either.  The language will tell you.  When someone who doesn’t speak English begins to study it, they know that they need to figure out what “is, the, he, she, it, they, them, those, here, there, in, on, out” all mean and how to use them correctly because they immediately see (and hear) them used at a very high frequency in all the English-language material they study.  You wouldn’t need to know anything about English to know this, you’d just need to start exposing yourself to it and it would become immediately obvious.  The language will tell you what you need to learn, and it will teach it to you.

Let’s now go into a bit more detail on the three main points I made above.

You need to learn those aspects of the language in current use by native speakers

I don’t think I need to say much about this, except that we should try to avoid outdated language or, and this is a bit more insidious, language which we are told is more important (more commonly used) than it really is (old textbooks are often guilty of this).  This leads me to the next point.

You need to learn words, expressions, and grammar in order of frequency of use (and you don’t need a word list or frequency dictionary for it)

Obvious, right?  You want to learn the most commonly used words and phrases first.

One of the problems with using material, like language instruction books (textbooks or otherwise), that teach the language itself is that even if they were published recently they can use sources from years or decades ago that give too much importance to certain words or phrases, e.g. overemphasis of “usted” in Spanish and its corresponding verb conjugations.

To take Spanish as an example: yes, you need to know how and when to use “usted”, and how to conjugate verbs for it, but it’s not as important as a lot of books would lead you to believe because it’s prevalence has dropped substantially amongst native speakers in the past couple of decades.  “Usted” is the formal way of saying “you”, and it used to be how people who weren’t intimately familiar with each other would refer to each other, even if they were of the same age and social status.  This is no longer the case.  It has largely been replaced by either “tú” or “vos”, depending on region, however a lot of textbooks still give more emphasis to “usted” and less to “tú” and “vos” when it should be the other way around.

The language will take care of all of this for you, and it will teach it to you, if you…

…simply expose yourself consistently to it in the form of contemporary media made by native speakers.

I used to say “made by and for native speakers” (because there used to be a lot of rather poor textbooks out there for students) but now there are a lot of really good YouTube channels and podcasts run by native speakers but directed towards students of their language, so I don’t think this is necessary anymore.

I think these YouTube channels, podcasts, etc. work so well because they’re able to be constantly updated and you can see and hear who you’re dealing with.  A textbook, on the other hand, was likely written over a period of several years (then throw in another year or two to edit and publish it) by a sixty-five year old professor of Spanish (or whatever language) who teaches the language they learned growing up (presuming they’re even a native speaker) and then said textbook isn’t seriously updated for the twenty years it’s used by the school that buys it, so the students are taught Spanish that is effectively fifty to seventy years old, at least.  Most of it will still be current (basic grammar, syntax, and core vocabulary change very slowly) but a substantial minority of it will not be.

Here’s how “the language teaches itself to you”:

1. As you’re exposed to the language, you focus on what you see the most (at the highest frequency) that you don’t already know.  Let’s look, for example, at the following sentence from a news broadcast in Spain, “La política viene marcada hoy por el arranque del actividad en el Congreso.  El primer pleno de la legislatura debatirá la convalidación o derogación de dos decretos del nuevo gobierno.”
2. A beginner should focus on words they know are very common, both because they’ve likely seen them before in Spanish already and because they know that they’re very common words/concepts in their own native language (this works pretty well: the words “dog”, “bush”, “house”, “go”, are all about as common in one language as any other).  In this case those would be words such as “viene” (present 3rd person of “venir”, “to come”), “hoy” (“today”), “por” (“by/due to”), “el” (“the”), “en” (“in”), “primer” (“first”), “de” (“of”), “o” (“or”), “dos” (“two”), and “nuevo” (“new”); they’ll look up the other words in order to understand the whole sentence, and that’s fine, but they’ll probably forget all but the most common ones like those I just mentioned, which is also fine, because…
3. They’ll see them again.  An intermediate student should focus on words they’ve seen before, and therefore know are important, but don’t yet know well enough, in the case of the example sentence that would be: “política” (“politics”), “marcada” (“marked”), “arranque” (“kick-off/beginning”), “actividad” (“activity”), “Congreso” (“congress”), “legislatura” (“legislature”), “debatirá” (future 3rd person of “debatir” which means “to debate”), and “gobierno” (“government”).  An advanced student would only bother with those words they don’t know, in this case probably, “pleno” (“plenary session”), “convalidación” (“validation” with regards to proposed laws or credentials), “derogación” (“repeal”), and “decreto” (“decree”).
4. As you continue to consistently study the language (persistent consistency, right?) you are naturally exposed to these same words, syntax, and grammar over and over again at the rate at which they are used in the language (so how commonly something is in a language determines how often you’ll see it, how often you “naturally review it”).  The most important things in a language to learn are those which are most commonly used, that is to say that importance corresponds to (and is determined by) frequency of usage, right?  This means you don’t need to try to determine what’s important and what needs reviewing when, the language will take care of that for you if you’re consistently exposing yourself to it via natural sources (those sources featuring native speakers speaking naturally).  You’ll quickly learn the most important parts of a language, then after that you’ll be able to focus on the next most important parts, and after you’ve learned those you can focus on the next most important parts, and so on and so forth.

This is a very simple method that’s complicated to explain and warrants a complicated explanation because if you don’t fully explain how it works to people then they won’t do it regardless of how simple and easy to execute it might be (walking around in public with a bagel taped to your head is both simple and easy to execute but I’d have a hard time convincing you to do it).

If you’d like to learn specifically how to use popular media to learn Spanish, I wrote a book about that called The Telenovela Method which is available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback format.  I also recommend a service called Yabla that uses popular media to teach languages by taking video clips from shows, movies, etc. and then surrounding them with various language learning tools (subtitles in both the language spoken and English, quizes, click a word in the subtitles and it looks it up and simultaneously adds it to your flashcards for later review, etc.).  I did a review of Yabla here if you’re interested.

Let me know what you all think in the comments.

Cheers,

Andrew

Go to Forvo.com, instructions on how to use it follow

Ok, so that’s the site you want (image on the left links to it or just click here) and here I’ll briefly show you how you can download the audio files and then use them to make electronic flashcards (with a program called Anki, it’s free) which you can use later to review your pronunciation and listening comprehension.

You’ll need to register for an account in order to be able to download files, it’s free and easy.

Once you’ve done that, go back to the homepage and now search for a word or phrase you want to hear pronounced.  At this point Forvo has just about every word in existence for the most common languages of the world, and a lot of common phrases, expressions, and proper names of things.  We’ll use the Spanish word, “aeropuerto”, for this example.

Now you’ll have the search results page.  Frequently the same word appears in multiple languages, so you’ll need to select the result for the language you’re interested in.  I have an arrow pointing to the one you’d want to click here for Spanish.

Notice that for each result you’re told (in the parentheses just to the right of each result) the gender of the speaker and which country they’re from.  Our options here include both male and female speakers from Mexico, Peru, and Spain.  This is useful if you want to focus on a specific dialect.

To download it, click the down arrow I’ve circled in red there.

Next you’ll want to open Anki (it’s an electronic flashcard program, if you’re not familiar with it see my article on Anki), go to the deck you want, and click add.

Lastly you’ll just drag and drop the MP3 file you’ve just downloaded into whichever field you want it in.  Here I’ve made the obvious choice of writing the word on the front and having the audio file as the back of the card.  What happens here is that you’re shown the front of the card (the word, “aeropuerto”, in this case) and then have to remember what’s on the back (the correct pronunciation of “aeropuerto”, in this case).

Please see the video I made for you below if any of this is unclear (it’s just me quickly demonstrating all of the above, it’s about a minute and a half).

I hope that was helpful, if you have any questions please leave them below.  Also…

If you’re learning Spanish…

I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

Don’t do this: it’s unnecessary, unpleasant, and not even the best way

Shortly after beginning to learn a language for the first time (few weeks, couple of months, something like that), you’ll figure out which of the activites you’ve been doing yields the best result in the least amount of time when you’re fresh and focused.  You will then attempt to force yourself to do this one activity all the time (because $100/hour for 10 hours straight is better than $100/hour for 2 hours and then $20/hour for the next 8 hours, right?). 

This will not work because you will, in short, burn out after doing this activity for [amount of time less than you were hoping] because it is inevitably mentally intensive.  Interspersing your performance of this particular language-learning activity with breaks, e.g. 5 minutes every 25 minutes, is better than nothing but it’s still not even close to the best way that I’ve found.

A balanced language-learning diet

You’ll want to do a wide variety of activities, a sort of balanced diet of language-learning where certain exercises are essential but should only be taken in small to medium amounts whereas others can and generally should be taken in larger amounts at more frequent intervals.  They vary not only in difficulty but also in which of the four main language skills they focus on: speaking, listening, reading, or writing.  The order in which these four skills should be prioritised by the student depends on the student and their objectives, that is what’s important to them.  If you’re learning the language primarily in order to be able to communicate with native speakers face-to-face (that’s most of you), your needs and therefore the skills you should focus on practicing will be different from someone who needs to learn the language to pass an exam or understand academic papers in their field (you’ll find a disproportionate amount of these people in the hard sciences learning French, incidentally, and if this is you I strongly recommend French for Reading by Sandberg and Tatham).

Andrew’s Language-Learning Pyramid

I feel silly doing this but it helps illustrate the point.  Note this is just a rough idea of one possible combination that I think would work well for a lot of people (it may not be the best way for you to learn a language but it’s probably a pretty good one).  I expand on these below.

1. Tutors: As I’ve said before, one-on-one sessions with a good tutor give you the best bang for your buck, that is to say that they have the best possible ROI of anything you could do.  You’ll learn more per minute in a good tutoring session than you will (per minute) doing anything else.  Nothing beats a good tutor.  It’s at the top because of this, however it’s also the smallest block in the pyramid because for reasons of money and time, most people can only spend a fraction of their total available language-learning time working with a tutor, e.g. perhaps 2 out of the 10 hours every week they’re able to make available for learning a language.  Tutors require you to be in a quiet environment with a computer/smartphone, have a good internet connection, and you have to be able to give them your uninterrupted attention for 30-60 minutes straight.  You can’t do this on your commute, while walking/jogging, in a cafe (some, maybe, most are too noisy), or when you only have 10 or 15 minutes available.
2. Intensive Study of Popular Media: This is what I like to emphasize, it’s where you pick a movie, series, or song in the language you want to learn, turn on subtitles in the language spoken (or have the lyrics in front of you in the case of a song), and then look up everything you don’t understand, speak it aloud until you sound like the native speaker, and possibly note down some/all/none of what you learned (this depends on several factors I won’t get into here).
3. Flashcards: This is where you review that which you have deigned to note down, those things that were noteworthy (not all is, in fact most isn’t).  This is going to be just about everything you learned in your tutoring session along with some/all of what you learned from previous study sessions with popular media, some of what you learned from one-way language lessons (like on YouTube) which I’ll discuss next, etc.  This is important, so it’s high up, but it also gets boring quickly so I don’t want you to spend too much time on it (maybe 15-90 minutes a day for most of you, depending).
4. One-Way Lessons: This is what I decided to call lessons about a language intended for students of it that are in the form of a video, blog post, PDF, podcast, book, etc.  I call them “one-way” in order to distinguish them from tutoring sessions which are two-way (you talk to the tutor, they talk to you).  I currently get almost all of mine from YouTube.  Some examples include channels like Butterfly Spanish, Spanishland School, Comme une Française, Français Authentique, and Easy German.  All of these are channels I can enthusiastically recommend, by the way.  For lot’s more YouTube channels to check out as well as advice on using YouTube to learn languages, please see the section of my blog, Learn Spanish from YouTube.
5. Moderate Study of Popular Media: Same as intensive study except you’re not looking up everything you don’t know, just whatever you, in your best judgement, deem important.  You note even less of it: only that which you think it highly likely that you’ll forget if you don’t note it down and review it.
6. Casual Study of Popular Media: This block is the biggest because you can spend a ton of time doing it because it’s not mentally intensive, you can afford to be occasionally distracted, and you’re not noting much if anything down at all (you can if you want here and there, it’s very “meh, do what you feel like”).  It’s on the bottom because it yields the least amount of learning per unit of time.  The input, however, still must be comprehensible: this means that if your listening comprehension isn’t good enough yet to understand most of it without subtitles (in the language spoken), then you need subtitles on, and it also means you should look up what you can’t understand (don’t worry, you’ll get most of it through context, plus looking something up takes two seconds when you’ve got Netflix/YouTube open in one tab and a Spanish dictionary in the other, for example).  Not only will you learn new words, grammar, and syntax this way but also, and also very importantly, you’ll review that which you already know and you’ll review it in a new way and a new context (this is fantastic for reinforcing something into your long term memory, far better than seeing the same word/phrase over and over again in the same way and the same context, e.g. the same flashcard).  Just because it’s on the bottom doesn’t mean it’s any less important than stuff which is higher up.

Ok, I have to stop here, and I suspect you want me to.  I’ll recommend a couple resources for you to check out, then we’re done:

Tutors: I recommend iTalki.  No one else is as large or as good right now in my opinion.  You can get excellent one-on-one tutoring sessions for about $7-15 (U.S. dollars) per hour.  Check out my review of them here for more information.  You can also find free language exchange partners on here.

Group classes: As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later.  A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher.  I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself.  You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane.  You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted.  They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).

A great tool to help you learn from popular media: Yabla (this is my review of them) is a service that takes popular media like TV shows and short video clips in the language you’re learning (they offer several) and embeds the video in a special platform specifically designed to help students learning that language do so from that video.  You get subtitles in both the language spoke and your native language, you can click on any word in the subtitles to see a definition of it and have it automatically added to your flashcards they provide for you to review later what you learned, you can have quizes and games based on the language used in the video, etc.  It’s really good, check out their site here or, again, you can see my review of them here.

Lastly, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

I hoped that helped, leave a comment if it did/didn’t or you have any questions or suggestions.

Cheers,

Andrew

This is a series of posts I decided to do explaining my reasons for so heavily emphasizing the use of popular media such as movies, series, songs, books, etc. in order to learn a language.  I want to say from the outset that I believe the single most efficient language-learning technique are one-on-one lessons with a good quality tutor – nothing beats that (please see the “Further Reading” at the end of this post for some recommended articles about language tutors).  However, the overwhelming majority of people cannot spend all of the time they have available to learn a language (say 10 hours a week as an example) working face-to-face with a tutor like this, they can perhaps spend something more like 2-3 hours per week with them (out of their available 10).  My specialty is helping you determine what to do with the rest of that time.

The single most common reason people who try to learn a language fail

They get bored, discouraged, and quit.  That’s why most people fail to learn a language, simple as that.  They get bored because the material they’re using is boring.  They get discouraged because of the relatively small amount of progress they see themselves making compared to what it’s costing them, mainly in terms of pain.  Pain, in this case, is the boredom they have to endure and the effort they have to expend, not to mention the sacrifice of time and money.  The whole process is just too unpleasant for them, the ROI (Return On Investment) is shit: they’re putting in a lot and getting back little in return.

This is why I rarely recommend any sort of formal self-study course or textbooks anymore.  There are some good ones but I just think, especially with what we have available via the internet these days, there are much better ways to do this.

Motivation is not only extremely important but it’s also not one-diminsional

I’ve talked about why motivation is so important before (long ago, it became apparent very early on in my language-learning endeavors the importance of this factor…especially after having tried and failed to learn about 5 different languages), but what I didn’t get at the time was that it wasn’t so one-dimensional as “have a good reason for wanting to learn the language you’re learning”, e.g. wanting to visit that country or be able to communicate with your wife’s inlaws.  This is a necessary part of it, but it’s long-term, it won’t keep you going all the time in your day-to-day study.  For that you need something else, something with a shorter-term (basically immediate or nearly immediate) pay-off.  You need to be entertained or interested.

Pick stuff you like

You should pick movies, netflix series, songs, books, comics, new stories, and YouTube videos that entertain you, that talk about a topic you’re interested in, that teach you interesting things about a hobby you enjoy, that discuss topics from the news, politics, economics, or your professional field that interest you, and which do so in an interesting and possibly even entertaining way.  These things hold your attention and keep you interested in the immediate, the short term, the right-now.  They make the whole process painless, or nearly so.  It won’t feel like work at all, even though you’re putting in a lot of effort (learning a language requires it!).

Pick stuff you like and to hell with whatever you find dry and boring, no matter how well you think it would teach you the language, because…because that presumes you properly study the whole thing, beginning to end, remaining focused the entire time.  You won’t, probably, and if you do manage to struggle through it you won’t retain much because the material wasn’t presented in an interesting and therefore memorable manner, so you don’t remember it later.  You know it, I know it.  I know it because I’ve tried to force myself to do precisely this over and over again in the past, I’ve watched countless others try it as well, and the result is the same every time: it doesn’t work.

Where to find interesting material in foreign languages to learn from

YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Apple TV, etc. for material in video format.  Turn on subtitles in the language being spoken (not the English subs), this way you can look up whatever you don’t know and learn it (a translation won’t let you do this).   Go here to find newspapers.  Readlang is a great tool specifically for working with online written material like newspapers.  I also strongly recommend a service called Yabla (this is my review of them) that takes popular media like TV shows and short video clips in the language you’re learning (they offer several) and embeds the video in a special platform specifically designed to help students learning that language do so from that video.  You get subtitles in both the language spoke and your native language, you can click on any word in the subtitles to see a definition of it and have it automatically added to your flashcards they provide for you to review later what you learned, you can have quizes and games based on the language used in the video, etc.  It’s really good, check out their site here or, again, you can see my review of them here.

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

Tutors

I’ve written extensively on tutors before, where to find them, how to work with them, etc.  Please see the articles below.

• One Advantage of Using a Tutor: They Have a Plan (based on experience with lots of students!)
• Another Advantage of a Tutor: MUCH Faster Error-Correction Rate Than Anything Else I’ve Experienced (which means you LEARN faster than anywhere else)
• iTalki Reviewed: Free Language Exchange Plus a Tutor-Student Marketplace (also: are tutors worth it?)
• My First iTalki Tutoring Session in German: What You Can Expect

Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts.  My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).

Cheers,

Andrew

Introduction

I’m going to teach you the method I use to memorize vocabulary nearly in real time as I hear or read it.  That means you memorize, briefly (we’ll come back to this), new words you encounter while you’re watching video content or reading in a foreign language.  You’ll have to briefly pause to do this, yes, there’s no way to memorize anything in the mere fraction of a second between spoken words, but this is still a very quick method that allows you to get through an online video, show, or movie you’re watching in a foreign language relatively quickly, which I’ve found to be extremely important as it maintains interest and entertainment

If you have to pause a lot it ruins the experience which makes it just unpleasant work which means you’ll quit soon.  One fundamental of my language-learning technique is that we always use material that is interesting, fun, or entertaining.  I avoid anything boring like the plague so that almost always means no text books, grammar books (ok to use as reference but you don’t just sit down and “read” one like a novel), or anything specifically designed for language students (I have exceptions to this, mainly parallel texts aka “readers” but that’s what those are: exceptions).  So we want to use movies, TV shows, YouTube videos, comics, songs, etc. that we would otherwise enjoy.

How to briefly memorize new words, quickly, until you can review them later

This isn’t the perfect solution, it’s just a tip that will help you.  Let’s be realistic here: there’s no way to memorize a new word in 0.5 seconds so that you’ll remember it forever and never need to review it.  What we can do is make it a lot easier to memorize and then eventually learn it (permanently).  The idea is that this little technique functions as the superglue that holds two boards in place while you run and get the hammer and nails.  This trick is the superglue, the hammer and nail (which permanently fixes it in your long term memory so that you’ve now learned it) is using the word repeatedly in actual communication with native speakers (oral or written – you need to do language exchanges or get a tutor, both easy to do online now).  So what’s the trick?

Right, first of all this presumes that the “input is comprehensible”.  This just means you have some way of figuring out what the words and phrases you don’t understand mean, whether it’s via looking them up or using subtitles or you’ve got a native speaker helping you.  If you can’t figure out what they mean then it’s going to be rather hard to memorize their meaning, which you don’t have, now isn’t it?  Most of you are wanting to use video of some form and so you want subtitles in the language being spoken (so if you’re watching a Spanish-language movie on Netflix, you want the Spanish subtitles turned on).  This lets you identify what it is that you’re hearing and don’t understand, and then you can just run the word or phrase through a dictionary or translator of some sort (I recommend Reverso Context because it gives you real-life context) in order to figure out what it means.

Next, you come up with a mental image that:

1. Reminds you of the word.  Usually this is done via picking an image that’s described using words you already know that sound very similar to the one you’re tryign to learn, e.g. in a moment we’ll use a Lays potato chip to remember that the French word for “to go” is “aller” (pronounced “ah-lay”): “aller” = “a lays chip” because “lays” sounds similar enough to “aller” that it reminds us of that particular French word, particularly when coupled with the image we’re going to use.
2. Reminds you of the meaning of the word.  This is done by having the image, the description of which sounds like the word you’re trying to memorize and thereby reminds you of it, do something that conveys what the word means.  In our “aller” example the lays chip will be running, that is “going”, which reminds us that “aller” means “to go”.

Example

We want to learn that the French word for “to go” is “aller”, pronounced “ah-lay”, like this (this is a native speaker saying it):

 So what sounds like “aller”?  Lays!  The brand that makes potato chips.

Right, we’ve got a word (“Lays”) that reminds of the word we want to use, “aller”, because it sounds like it.  Also, importantly, that word (“Lays”) can easily be pictured in the form of a potato chip.  So now how can we get an image of a Lays potato chip to convey the meaning of “aller”, which is “to go”.  We see a huge, human-sized Lays potato chip running…at a bullfighter, who says “Aller!”  Great, we’ve got back-up here: the chip reminds us of “aller” and so does what we imagine the bullfighter saying (in Spain they say “Olé!”, here our bullfighter says “Aller!”).

The more ridiculous, animated, and generally abnormal your image is, the more memorable it is and therefore the better it’ll work.  We don’t remember normal things, they don’t stand out, we remember weird things regardless of why they were weird.  It doesn’t matter what makes it weird, it just needs to be weird, to stand out as much as possible.

Some more examples

Try these yourself before you read what I came up with.  Really try to picture them in your head.

1. “Casa”, the Spanish word for house.  A “case” of some sort, of course, immediately comes to mind.  You and your family/dog/roomates/whatever are all living in a giant briefcase.  You have to stick your head out the window and dial in the correct combination to the lock in order to unlock the case and get out of your house every day.  You sleep in one of the pockets usually used for documents or socks or a pen or whatever.  The more ridiculous, disproportionate, animated, and colorful, the better.  Really see it.  I promise I could ask you in a week how to say “house” in Spanish and you’d pause briefly, see this strange thing in your mind, and say “Oh! Um…ummm…case…caaasayy…no, uh…casa!”.
2. “Danke”, the German word for “thank you” (pronounced “don-kuh”).  A famous basketball player (picture one you know and therefore will remember, preferrably – the more specific things are the more memorable they are, details are good) goes in for a dunk!  Yes, “dunk”, that’s perfect, it sounds close enough to “danke” to remind us of it.  He runs to dunk…one of those big, soft German pretzels in…a giant mug of beer!  The mug of beer is about as tall as the basketball net would be, it’s huge, he runs but he’s not going to make it, so you run out on the court and lift him up to help him.  He makes it, shoots finger guns at you, and says, “thanks, man”.  “Danke”.  “Danke” means “thank you”.  If I ask you in a few days how to say “thank you” in German, you’re going to think of some weird imagery involving a basketball player with a pretzel and a giant mug of beer, then you’re going to remember and say “Oh yeah, it’s ‘danke'”.
3. “Plutôt”, pronounced “plew-toe”, is the French word for “rather”.  Think this is hard because you can’t visualize the concept of “rather”?  Nah, just envision a context where it applies or is used.  You’re having a conversation with the (former) planet of Pluto, you ask it if it would like to be a planet again.  It’s seated in a chair, with glasses, smoking a pipe and reading.  It looks up at you and snobbily says “I’d rather not”, then goes back to reading.

It doesn’t need to be perfect, the “reminder” words (“dunk”, “pluto”) don’t need to sound exactly like the word you’re trying to remember (“danke”, “plutôt”), they just have to be close enough to remind you of it.  Also, this is just meant to help you memorize the word in the short term until you have an opportunity to use it, either in the form of input where it’s part of a sentence in a movie or newspaper article or whatever that you’re later watching or reading, or in the form of output where you need to use it to communicate with a native speaker.  It’s just the superglue temporarily holding the boards in place until you can nail them down with the hammer and nail of later, repeated, real-life usage.

Two additional resources you should look at if you liked this

I wrote a much more comprehensive article about how to learn vocabulary that has a lot more examples and images (done by an actual artist as opposed to the Lays-bullfighter crap above that was done by me, which is why it’s crappy) and also goes into much more detail about how to do this and includes information on the “later application” part of the equation.

There’s a great service called Yabla (this is my review of them) that takes popular media like TV shows and short video clips in the language you’re learning (they offer several) and embeds the video in a special platform specifically designed to help students learning that language do so from that video.  You get subtitles in both the language spoke and your native language, you can click on any word in the subtitles to see a definition of it and have it automatically added to your flashcards they provide for you to review later what you learned, you can have quizes and games based on the language used in the video, etc.  It’s really good, check out their site here or, again, you can see my review of them here.

Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format.  If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.

This is what I consider to be the single most important concept you must apply when learning a language, or any complex subject.  You have to be persistently consistent.  What does that mean?

Memory

In order to learn something, you must be exposed to it repeatedly.  After a single exposure to a word or phrase you’d like to remember in, say Spanish, you’ll be able to recall it for somewhere between a few minutes and a few hours, presuming no mnemonic techniques were employed, and you’ll be able to recognize it and recall it’s meaning for perhaps a few days, at best.  This is something called the Forgetting Curve, first formalized in the scientific literature by Hermann Ebbinghaus in 1888.  This knowledge was later built upon by the development of spaced repetition systems and tools, such as Anki.  The basic concept is simple: expose the student to each individual concept they want to learn (e.g. on a single flashcard, whether paper or digital) repeatedly over time with an increasing interval of time between exposures.  You review it a lot in the beginning and then less and less over time because it’s no long necessary to review it as often.  You might review a single flashcard (containing a single vocabulary word, for example) three times in the first week after you first learn it, then twice over the next month, then three times over the next six months after that.  It is now quite permanently fixed in your long-term memory.  You have “learned” it (for good).

You know what works even better than flashcards?  Natural exposure that results in the same essential effect, that is repeated exposure to the same information (which you want to learn).

Consistency

Pick something that is entertaining and/or interesting for you, preferrably something by and for native speakers so that the language contained therein is natural, the type they use every day amongst themselves, the type you want to learn.  Popular media like movies, TV shows, podcasts, and books are great for this, it’s one of several reasons why I recommend them for language-learning.  Consistently expose yourself to the language you want to learn via this media.  This means every day (or at least six days a week – as consistently as you can practically manage, in other words).  Consistency counts for far more than quantity of time, e.g. three hours spread evenly over the week is far better than five hours on Saturday.  Why?

Because you repeatedly expose yourself to the language over a consistent period of time.  This means you will see the most commonly used words and expressions over and over again, as well as the most common grammatical and syntactical structures (which you’ll learn intuitively, don’t worry about them).  The most commonly used language is what you want to learn first, right?

People bother themselves with all kinds of unnecessary stuff over this.  All they really need to do is just go, go, go, meaning watch twenty, thirty, sixty minutes, or whatever they can, of Spanish-language TV/movies/podcast/etc. every single day.

*Note: this input must be comprehensible, meaning that you have to understand it in order to learn it.  All that means is that you look up what you don’t know so that you understand it.  The best way to do this with video and audio material is to simply have subtitles (for video) and a transcript for audio.  If you’re learning Spanish, please see my List of Sites Where You Can Watch Spanish Videos with Spanish Subtitles or Transcripts Online.

Let the Language Tell You What You Need to Learn

One of my most popular posts which, don’t get me wrong, I’m quite proud of as a good deal of work went into it and it’s been repeatedly cited by other sources over the years, is an article about how many words you need to know and which ones you should be learning – which ones in this case determined by frequency of use.  People go hear, read the study, by frequency dictionaries, and base their study of a language on frequency lists of vocabulary and phrases.  I think this is…unnecessary.  What you really need to do is just consume popular media, in the language you want to learn, every single day, while looking up and learning as much of it as possible.  If you would like a guide on how to do this, I…um…wrote a whole book about it.

This will take care of exposing you to the language you most need to learn, because which words/phrases/syntax/grammar are “reviewed” (via seeing/hearing them in the media you’re consuming) and how frequently is automatically determined by how commonly used they are, with the most commonly used such items being the most important and the ones you should learn first.  Let the language tell you what you need to learn.

You’ll know that you need to learn the word “soy” (means “I am”) in Spanish because, as you watch Spanish-language TV shows and movies, listen to Spanish-language songs and podcasts, and read Spanish-language books and newspapers, you will see that word use a lot.  You will very quickly learn what it means.  Same goes for other such similarly frequent words as, “quedar” (to remain), “llegar” (to arrive), “estar” (to be in a certain state), “casa” (house), etc.  “Casa” doesn’t need a flashcard.  “Soy” doesn’t need a flashcard.  “Llegar” doesn’t need a flashcard.  If you’re exposing yourself to Spanish-language media on a consistent basis you’ll see them a dozen times each in your first week.

Persistency

This is just, “don’t give up”.  You have to persistently be consistent in exposing yourself to, and applying, the language (that is, apply what you just learned whenever possible).  A language is a huge, complex, corpus (that’s Latin for “body”) of information, all interconnected (this word is related to that one, which is used in this phrase, and the use of which is governed by that grammar rule, etc.).  It’s very intimidating at first in that you can’t understand anything and it seems like you never will, it seems so difficult, it seems like a lost cause.

If you do what I’m telling you here, at the end of your first week of consistently exposing yourself to the language for just thirty minutes a day, you won’t feel that way.  You’ll see massive progress and think, “I can do this…it’s going to take a while, but I can do it”.  Do it.

Cheers,

Andrew

For more similar articles, please check out my General Foreign Language Learning category.