“This is the first real direct insight into how the brain, on a cellular level, changes the strength of its connections during sleep,” Frank says.

According to Frank, the brain is fundamentally different– in terms of biochemical, enzymatic changes– when sleeping than when awake. “To our amazement, we found that these enzymes never really turned on until the animal had a chance to sleep,” Frank explains, “As soon as the animal had a chance to sleep, we saw all the machinery of memory start to engage.”

This research focuses on how memories are formed or stored, not how they are recalled. But if you want to correctly recall Spanish vocabulary, it needs to be stored first. So, if you want to remember what you’re working to learn, sleep on it.

Source: Penn Study Shows Why Sleep is Needed to Form Memories

You should take every opportunity you have to speak with someone in Spanish, and use it for your benefit. You might start with just a word or a comment, and the other person will most likely welcome the conversation.

How to start? It’s as easy as “Hola”, “Buenos Días”, “Hace mucho frío”, “Hace mucho calor”, or “Gracias”.

If you do this you’ll start reaping the benefits.

Benefits of striking up conversation with strangers

1. You meet new people, and possibly even gain new friends.
2. You will get more respect– others who have a fear of talking to strangers will respect you more, as well as your interlocutor.
3. You’ll learn new things. The person you’re talking with has interests, ideas, and goals. Finding out what they think will open doors for you and you’ll learn all kinds of things.
4. Every time you do it, it will become easier. You will start overcoming fear if you’re fearful of speaking with strangers, and if it simply makes you uncomfortable, once you’re used to it, that uneasiness will be gone.
5. There’s really no risk– after all, you don’t know the person, so what would it possibly matter if they think poorly of you?
6. Your Spanish will improve. Every chance you get to speak with someone in Spanish is another chance for your conversational skills to improve.

So, when was the last time you talked with a complete stranger in Spanish? When was the last time you talked to anyone in Spanish?

How can you stay that way long enough to actually learn the language?

You’re motivated, committed and ready. Here’s some tips for staying that way.

Commit to 30 days. If can pass the thirty day mark in your language studies, you’ll form a habit. That habit of studying language will help push you to continue doing it.

Study every day. I’m convinced you need to take time every day to study and review what you’re learning. This can be 30 minutes, an hour, or more, but you need to have some input in your target language every day.

Reward yourself. I’ve said often that motivation is an important factor in language learning. Rewarding yourself after you reach certain goals is a great way to foment motivation.

Recognize that it’s painful. Learning can be painful. It’s not always easy. It takes time. You’ll have to sacrifice. Realize this and accept it. You’ll know that you’re paying a price, but the reward is great. As much as the natural language proponents want, you’ll never learn as easily and as naturally as an infant because you’re not an infant.

Remember it gets easier. Just as learning is a painful, costly experience, it also gets easier. As you learn the basic building blocks of Spanish, the rest will become easier and easier.

Get a partner. Find someone who’ll commit to learning Spanish with you. Compare your successes and failures. Encourage each other.

Keep it simple. At least at the beginning of your studies, don’t worry if you run into a complex grammatical construction that you can’t make heads nor tails of. Forget about it and go on. This will accomplish two things. You won’t bog yourself down and lose motivation trying to understand something that with you current knowledge isn’t feasible, and second, you will have more time to continue with the studies that are at your level. So forget about the things you can’t understand at the moment. In due time all things will be revealed to you.

Diversify. You need to have a varied approach to learning language. You need to listen, read and speak some Spanish. You need a bit of grammar, as long as explicitly learning grammar doesn’t scare you off. If the idea of grammar causes such anxiety in you that you can’t learn, they don’t even study grammar. Take the slower, more natural approach of subconsciously deducing grammar from the language you’re learning. The key here is to take a varied approach to learning.

Keep your goal in mind. While learning can be a slow process, keep in mind that you don’t have to know all of a language to start using it. Very soon after starting your studies, you can start using your new language in meaningful ways. Your goal of speaking Spanish is closer than you think.

I’ve sifted through all 113 posts from the last 365 days and the following are the cream of the crop, the most helpful posts of the year.

1. Five common mistakes that English speakers make when learning Spanish.

2. Seven tips for foreign language learning success.

3. The right way to use a bilingual dictionary.

4. Focus on learning the Spanish you’re interested in.

5. The 24 most useful Spanish words you can learn.

6. Nine vital factors in language learning.

7. Have you got attitude?

8. The one most important thing you can do to learn a foreign language.

9. Memory tricks to help you learn vocabulary.

10. Eleven way to learn Spanish or any other foreign language.

Here’s to hoping (and knowing) this coming year will be even better than this last one.

Nor is the language learner like a brick wall.

Building a brick wall uses the same process as gaining language fluency and offers us a solid metaphor for language learning.

Building Blocks

As a bricklayer begins building a wall, he joins the bricks together with mortar, placing each brick carefully, and ensures that the wall rises vertically at 90 degrees.

Each Spanish word you learn is a brick. You begin placing them at the base of your language learning, joining them together with the grammar rules you are learning. You place one word upon another, just as with bricks. One of the first words you learned was libro, then when the word librería came up, you easily placed that brick upon the first one and your Spanish language structure became stronger. When you learned of libreta, librero, and libresco those bricks were easily secured to the structure based on the foundation of the previous words.

Every time you learn a new word, it becomes attached to the language structure you are forming, strengthening the structure. As the structure grows and becomes more solid, it becomes easier and easier to add new words.

A House of Cards

We are building a brick structure, firmly mortared in place, and not a house of cards. Be deliberate with every new word. Give yourself a reason to remember it. Relate it to previous words you already know and use, causing it to adhere firmly to your structure. If you let words in one ear and out the other, it’s like throwing a brick at your wall and wishing it would magically find it’s place and stick there, even becoming a foundation for other new words.

It won’t happen.

Randomly studying the language without taking the effort to consolidate what you’re learning into a strong and well-understood foundation is like building a house of cards. You can only build so long before it crashes.

Drive-Thru Language Learning

We’re spoiled with instant this and while-you-wait that. People want a fast-food language learning experience. Instead of investing the time to properly marinate the steaks, they want to pull up, order, and drive away with a steaming bag of McSpanish.

Language learning shouldn’t be rushed.

Take your time to carefully lay just a few bricks, and wait for the mortar to harden before adding more. Take a single paragraph of real, live Spanish from a newspaper and force yourself to learn every single word in it. Use each one of those words in a new sentence. Then review those words every day for two weeks. You’ll be laying good solid bricks that will allow your language learning structure to grow larger than, and last longer than the Coliseum.

Bricks and Mortar Together

You’ve probably seen ancient dry stone fences and walls. They can be strong and last a long time, but are usually made by interlocking the stones. You could build a dry brick wall with carefully laid bricks, but if you use mortar, it’ll be stronger.

As you continue to learn words and expand your vocabulary, you also need some grammar and some knowledge of how to put those words together and form sentences. Would you build a house using only bricks or using only mortar? What good it is to know grammar but not know any words so you can put it to use? And how can it help you to have a large vocabulary if the longest sentence you can muster consists of two words? Try to strike a balance so you can grow your language with the correct mixture of bricks and mortar.

Now go buy a periódico, pick a paragraph, and start laying those bricks.

Do you have any tips to add?

About Dr. Pimsleur

Paul Pimsleur was a French teacher, linguist and memory expert whose research focused on language acquisition and how children learn language without having formal knowledge of their language’s grammar and structure. His four basic tenets are: Anticipation, Graduated Interval Recall, Core Vocabulary, and Organic Learning. The result of this research was his language learning system that trains adults in a new language using an all-audio approach. Learners listen and speak along with a CD and learn their target language in a naturalistic fashion.

This is all good and well, but the typical Pimsleur course costs about $250. Is it worth it?

Free Spanish Lesson

See for yourself by taking the Spanish course for a test drive. Simon & Schuster, the publishers of Pimsleur’s works, offers the first 30-minute lesson of the Pimleur course for most languages. Download or listen to the mp3 of the first Spanish lesson, and see what you think.

Buy the Full Course

If you’re convinced, you can get it on amazon That’s the level one course, there are also level two and level three. Each one has thirty 30-minute lessons. If you don’t want to pop for one of these full-fledged courses, you can get just the first 8 lessons for about $20.

Here are links to these courses on Amazon, which is a lot cheaper than some other bookstores. Disclosure: If you use these links to buy a course, I will get a fee from Amazon for referring you to them.

• Spanish Quick & Simple (Lessons 1-8) about $15
• Spanish One (Lessons 1-30) about $220
• Spanish Two (Lessons 31-60) about $220
• Spanish Three (Lessons 61-90) about $220

You can find all kinds of things on the BBC website, and one of those that I ran across today is a Basic Spanish course. It’s designed for kids, but it looks useful to anyone who is beginning to learn Spanish. There’s lots of basic vocabulary and phrases with interactive characters that pronounce the words for you. After you’ve gone through the basics, browse the learn more section where there’s a handful of other units. It’s all fairly basic, but very well done, with visual and audio interaction, and the four cartoon characters that lead you around.

It didn’t work.

I’d make 20 flash cards, go over them dozens of times and actually learn the words and meanings. Later, in a test, conversation or reading assignment, I would see the word again. But with the change in context, I no longer made the association with the English translation.

You see, learning with flashcards is really just another form of rote learning.

Flashcards Encourage Rote Learning

Rote learning is any type of learning where you focus on learning the material at hand while purposely ignoring the inner workings of it. You ignore how something works and why you want to learn it, and instead focus solely on memorizing the material, often word-for-word, so you’re able to regurgitate it at a later time. I often memorized facts in this fashion, to be able to recall them for an exam.

With language learning you don’t want to memorize the facts while ignoring the why and how. You don’t want to learn a word in isolation, or in a stack of flashcards, because when you run across the word in a real-life context, you likely won’t recall the meaning.

A Better Stategy

A better strategy is learning the words in their real-life context, so that the next time you see them in the same or similar context, it will jog your memory and you’ll know their meaning.

Let me explain this in a more practical fashion. We’ll take an example word estreñimiento in Spanish, and assume you need/want to learn it. Instead of repeating estreñimiento – constipation dozens of times with flashcards, let’s see how you can learn it better.

First of all, find the word in its context. Do a web search and find some pages that talk about the subject. Look it up in the encyclopedia. Find it used in sentences. Almost anything will do, so long as you’re not dealing with the bare word. Now let’s see how we’re going to interact with the word to actually learn it, since flashcards are off-limits. Here’s a few suggestions: reflextion, observation, reasoning, active learning (doing), analysis, communication. These are basically critical thinking skills. Reflect on the word. Have you seen it before? Does it sound like any other Spanish words you know? Does it look like it comes from a Latin root that Spanish and English have in common? Now observe the word. Do you recognize any familiar affixes? Maybe -miento? Now do some reasoning. Estreñimiento kind of sounds like the English word strain. If you’re estreñido, you’re definitely going to do some straining. Now for some active learning- make the sounds of a person with estreñimiento or picture how someone’s face looks when they have this condition. Analyze the word further. Can you derive a verb, adjective, adverb from it? Use the word in some communication. Use the word in the essay you have to turn in this afternoon. Work it into your hour of Spanish conversation practice.

Now you might say, David, I do all those things, but I still forget the words I’m studying, that’s why I want to use flashcards.

I Still Need Flashcards

I often had the problem that I’d be learning some words, using the above techniques, but then all of the sudden in a conversation I’d want to use a word, but couldn’t recall it quick enough to use it. Here’s where I’ll suggest using a small notebook to write down some words, to remind you of them. I’d suggest a notebook simply because you can carry it with you easier and flip through it to find the word you’re thinking of. It seems more practical to me than flashcards.

I will admit flashcards do have a place. Sometimes, you want to memorize something for just a few hours, and then forget it. I also realize that each of us has a certain inclination as to our learning preferences. Some learn by listening, others by reading, other by writing, others by doing etc. If you do choose to use flashcards, try to use some of the techniques I’ve mentioned to change your rote learning into something more permanent. It’ll help your foreign language abilities.

Thanks Liz for the inspiration that sparked the thought that spawned this post.

Find some Spanish Department websites

The first step is finding some good Spanish Department websites. You can try different directories of colleges, such as AZ College, or just go to good old Google or any of the other search engines. Try putting in searches for things like:

• Spanish department (okay, that one was kind of obvious)
• college Spanish department
• Spanish 101
• Introduction to Spanish
• Syllabus for Spanish
• Textbooks for Spanish
• Spanish practice exam

If you find that you’re getting too many junk sites in the search results, try tacking on the search operator inurl:edu (works in Google). For example the search for Spanish 101 returns a bunch of spammy sites, but if you search for “spanish 101 inurl:edu” it will only look for pages on university (.edu) sites. Another good tactic is looking for individual Spanish professors’ personal websites, by searching for things like “Spanish prof”.

Now let’s look for the resources

To find good resources, you’ll usually just have to click around the sites you find and see if they have anything good. Here are some golden tidbits I’ve found, which should give you an idea of what you can find too. BTW, These are all free.

1. Cornell College has some practice exams for various levels (101, 102, 103, & 205) of Spanish where you can test your Spanish skills. You can also test your listening comprehension with this test.

2. MIT has some good stuff like a list of Spanish language news and magazines (I recommend this), as well as a program called Open Courseware that allows you to view or download entire courses, including in-class activities and multi-media support material. You can browse several Spanish courses here. The Foreign Languages & Literature department at MIT also has some cool projects going on, such as No Recuerdo, which is an interactive video project that provides students with a sort of “simulated” total immersion in Spanish. You can view/use parts of it via the link above, but the whole project is only available on CDROM. Also check out some Spanish-language interviews from the España de Cerca project. MIT has *lots* of resources, and I’ll finish off with the Mexico Living Guide, which will bring you up to speed with maps & directions, and advice about food, transportation, safety, nightlife and business norms for Mexico.

3. The University of Texas operates LANIC, the Latin America Network Information Center, which is basically a directory of Spanish-language websites, and sites about Spanish or Latina American countries or topics.

4. Some other assorted resources: A collection of Spanish realia (Photographs of authentic items from Spanish-speaking countries, usually with text in Spanish). I also like Berkeley’s PhiloBiblon which allows you to search ancient Spanish manuscripts. (Note: it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment, let’s hope it’s just a temporary hiccup).

Now it’s your turn to go see if you can find even better resources! If you do, let me know in the comments.