Learning Spanish vs. Practicing Spanish
El Blog de Ingles, a blog by a (Spanish) English professor who lives in Madrid, had a really interesting post the other day in which Monica, the author, wrote about her experience living in America and having Americans tell her “Yo hablo español.“, only to be unable to then understand any sort of basic questions she asked them.
The blog post brought back a few memories, not too long ago I was one of those people. I traveled through Central America a couple of years ago and was like “Yeah, I speak Spanish.” and then proceeded to stumble my way through every simple interaction, from ordering a meal to buying a bus ticket. Natalie had a similar experience, arriving in Mexico right after completing university and a one year Spanish course, only to find that she too didn’t have a clue what was being said around her. Our own experiences, and the ones Monica describes on her blog, are really great examples of the difference between learning a language and practicing/speaking one.
In a one year college level Spanish course you are going to probably learn 500-2000 words (depending on whether you want to be there, or are just there to get through your one year of required language), and cover just about every grammatical construction possible in the Spanish language. But, you are never going to have a real interaction, or practice speaking with a native speaker of the language (except for perhaps the professor). You’ll leave the course thinking you have a fairly solid grasp on the language, but as soon as you try to speak it in a real life situation you promptly realize you don’t speak a damn word.
It took me a while to figure this out. It wasn’t until Natalie and I had packed our bags and settled down in Latin America that I learned just how big the difference is between the real life applications of a language and what is taught in a classroom.
This realization, and our desire to perfect our own Spanish, was the basis for building Lenguajero. For those people who are serious about speaking a new language very few internet resources exist. (I will be putting together my top 10 list in a post very soon.)
To truly learn a language is to speak it, to listen to it, to read it (not the examples from a textbook), and to understand the culture behind it. We believe that there are some simple things you can do to immerse yourself from the culture everyday, even from your own living room. By spending time everyday interacting with someone who speaks the language you learn, and by trying to learn about their culture, their politics, and their perspectives on global issues you will find that your ability to speak your new language will increase exponentially.
August, I might be breaking your bubble with this short comment, but hopefully you can do something with it.
On this blog I see you talking a lot about speaking in order to get better at Spanish. That sounds logical, but is that the case? Just think a moment about this: can you produce something you didn’t learn? How can you say something you never heard? Many people think they learn simply by speaking, but that’s not how kids learn (and they learn darn good).
Research shows (try to google Stephen Krashen) that the key to fluency is input. The more you hear something, the more it sticks. You don’t have to understand anything; if you just watch TV in Spanish and listen (you don’t even have to try to get every word, just listen) it’ll stick. And I’m not talking about 10 or 20 hours. No, hundreds or even thousands of hours!
That’s how I learned Spanish. I major Spanish in college and most of my classmates SUCK at Spanish. I have a near-native accent and can say about anything I want to say, and that all within two years. My ’secret’ is that I just shut up the first 1000+ hours and only listened. I still continue to listen, but also read crazy amounts of Spanish. Speaking is only a part of my language acquisition, as it transfers the input (that’s in the ’slow memory’) to the ‘fast memory’ (the speaking area in your brain).
For everything we want to do we first need to learn (take input). A programmers often reads thousands of lines of code before writing programs himself, so why would language learning be different? I mean, I’ve never seen a kid speaking from day one. No, instead he/she takes months and months of input and only then starts speaking.
Like I said: google for Stephen Krashen. The guy is a genius and put his own advice in practice and learned several languages with it. Really, the most successful language learners on the net learned their languages this way (or similair ways, but not by just speaking).
Thanks for the insightful comment. I agree that you should be taking in lots of input and not worrying about understanding all of it.
What I am referring to by practicing a language is that it is necessary to speak in order to train yourself how to construct sentences, and pronounce words in your new language (something that is usually very difficult for most people). Also, when speaking to someone you are getting lots of input – you are listening to them, which is more active than watching tv (and more fun…well, sometimes).
Here are some other things that I do to learn Spanish.
There is no doubt that input is crucial to language learning but consider, output, in the form of speaking allows you to enter a stream of conversation and increase your opportunity for interaction. Interaction is extremely motivating in and of itself. It is far more satisfying for most people than sitting and listening for 1,000 hours before saying anything.
P.S.- I am here via Kirsten Winker’s blog.