1. Get motivated to learn the language. This includes internal motivation (you want to learn it), and external motivation (you must complete two years of foreign language to graduate).
2. Work hard at it. Give it your best effort. Commit lots of time to learning, both active (studying a workbook, memorizing vocab) and inactive learning (listening to music in your target language).
3. Shed your fears. If you are not outgoing, do what it takes to get over the fear of making mistakes and the fear of striking up a conversation. You’ll see how it makes a difference in your progress.
4. Wrap your mind around the task. Simplify all the rules, grammar and vocab you are learning and organize it logically. The task of working through all the information you are acquiring will help you consolidate the knowledge and make it useable in a conversation. It will be at your fingertips instead of having to rummage around for three minutes to produce a grammatical sentence. When I used to study for a final exam, I would try to get all the most important information onto one single sheet of paper. The very act of consolidating and simplifying the information started the learning process and then the well-organized and limited information on the sheet of paper was a piece of cake.
5. Don’t box yourself into your own culture. Imagine yourself living/working/studying in your target language’s culture. If you feel comfortable with that, you will be more comfortable imitating native speakers of the language, giving you a big learning advantage.
6. Stop asking why. Asking why isn’t always bad, and at some point you’ll want to know all the intricacies of Spanish, but for now if there is something you can’t understand, don’t lose sleep over it. Simply accept the fact that the language works that way, imitate it, and go on. In due time all things will be revealed to you.
7. Keep moving forward. Remember the Tortoise and the Hare? The Tortoise won the race by continuing on and not giving up, even though the faster Hare should have won. If you keep plodding on you will eventually prevail. Even if you only have a few minutes every day, keep advancing.

Do you have any tips to add?

If you’re in the market for learning Spanish, you probably have heard of Dr. Paul Pimsleur’s books and audio courses for language acquisition.

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.

Since grade school, I had used those 3×5 inch index cards to make flashcards, writing a question on one side, and the answer on the other. When I started studying Spanish nearly ten years ago, I went back to the flash card idea to review and learn vocabulary.

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.

There are hundreds colleges and universities that have a Spanish department and the majority of these have a website. Let’s do some investigating and see what useful information and resources we can find from these sites.

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:

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