Maluma’s Songs Will Teach You More Spanish than Any Textbook

Why traditional language learning sucks and what to do instead

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

How to learn a language?

If you asked me this question a few years ago, I’d say commit to learning through textbooks, read, translate, study grammar, preferably for 4–5 hours a day. But now I think it’s completely wrong.

Learning grammar to acquire language feels like trying to blow away the door to enter the building when in reality, all you need to do is use the handle.

This article is all about language learning, or more specifically, language acquisition. I’m going to explain why I think traditional methods don’t work and I’m also going to share with you my findings on what works best.

Make yourself a cup of tea, it’s going to be a long read.

Let’s begin.

I had the experience of learning foreign languages at university the traditional way. But even before that, I’ve been learning English at school for 10 years, two of which were super intense lessons with a private tutor using the FCE level material (that’s upper-intermediate or B2).

How well do you think I knew it?

My very first English class at university — the teacher asks students to get up and introduce themselves. It’s my turn to speak up, and here I am, knowing five synonyms to “build” but unable to find words to tell the class where I’m from.

Things turned out pretty well with English. I was very lucky to acquire it in the immersive environment. We had all the lectures delivered to us in English and all the teachers speak in an amazing British accent, so it felt very much like we were in London.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about our second language. It was Spanish, and let me tell you, it did not feel like we were in Madrid. It felt like we were in Moscow in 1972.

The textbook that we used was as irrelevant as things can get. You could take the vocabulary on any topic and there had to be something about the sincerest friendship between the USSR and Latin America.

Say, if the unit was about “food”, there had to be some Salvador Duran who was going to the restaurant to celebrate the Independence Day of Cuba with his Russian friend Ivan Petrov, and there they would be able to llamar al camarero, comer la carne y las verduras* and so on.

*llamar al camarero — call the waiter

*comer la carne y las verduras — eat meat and vegetables

Here’s what we did to “learn” Spanish the traditional way:

• Wrote out vocabulary lists without context into a separate notebook with translation in our native language;
• Did lots of grammar drills;
• Read and translated texts in our textbook;
• Tried to retell the text that we’ve just read;
• Learned these texts VERBATIM (these were really long, sometimes the equivalent of 2 pages A4 in 11pt).
• Wrote compositions about ourselves based on the vocabulary lists;
• Learned and retold these compositions; and
• Watched Extra (an A2-B1 level show) occasionally.

Did I speak Spanish? Technically, I did. But it wasn’t a fluent speech. It was more like reciting the phrases from all these texts I learned by heart. And it was good while it lasted because I forgot everything I knew over the summer.

Three months after graduation, I couldn’t say shit in Spanish. And here’s why.

One doesn’t “learn” the language

My diploma says “Teacher of Foreign Languages and World Literature”, so I got familiar with the term “language acquisition” very early. And for years I was convinced that “grammar first” was the way to go if you wanted to acquire a new language. Turns out, grammar has nothing to do with language acquisition.

One of the first people to ever emphasize the distinction between language learning and language acquisition was Dr. Stephen Krashen — a linguist and educational researcher at the University of California, LA.

Here’s how he explains both:

“Acquisition” means picking up a language, subconsciously absorbing the language having a feel for it. Learning means what we did in school — knowing the rules, being able to consciously remember what they are, talk about them, etc.”

His big breakthrough was that they are different, and that acquisition is much more powerful than learning.

According to Dr. Krashen, the only thing that actually works in learning language is when a person understands the message conveyed by the other person — comprehensible input. And mind you, “message” is not solely a verbal communication.

It’s hard to say what percentage of communication is non-verbal. One popular opinion is Albert Mehrabian’s 55/38/7 rule.

It’s not quite true though. The proportion of verbal and non-verbal can be 55/38/7 in certain situations, but it’s not a universally valid rule.

I researched this question a little deeper and from what I found, it’s more likely that non-verbal and verbal are divided into the 60/40 ratio correspondingly.

The point is that communication is not only about words, which brings us to another critical takeout.

Learning is conscious, the acquisition is subconscious

Remember me “learning” Spanish for more than three years and forgetting most of it in just three months?

That’s because it was stored in a short-term conscious mind, which is not where the language is supposed to be stored.

The right place for language is the subconscious long-term memory.

What traditional learning does is basically tortures your conscious mind with repetitive drilling of mostly irrelevant things in a very limited context (recall my Spanish textbook from the USSR). And don’t get me wrong, it also works.

You can learn the language patterns so well that they will eventually become the locus of implicit knowledge — something that you’ve learned so well that you do it without thinking. But eventually, it is going to be stored in your SUBCONSCIOUS anyway.

To make the distinction even more clear, acquisition and learning are processed by the brain differently. If we’re talking about the adult person’s brain, the language acquisition is mostly handled by the Broca’s area, whereas the language learning — by Wernicke’s area.

Image source

You can learn grammar rules for 10 years and top it with 4 years of immersive education as I did, or you can acquire the language to the same level by watching Cartoon Network and playing video games like my boyfriend.

No, he’s surname is not Einstein, he’s also Ukrainian, never lived in an English-speaking country, and no, his family doesn’t speak any English.

He doesn’t know what “past participle” means, he won’t be able to show you a direct object in the sentence, but he has enough knowledge to communicate with native speakers on the same level as I do.

So my question is, if the outcome is exactly the same, why the torture?

Getting back to my Spanish…

It was not over.

My Spanish came back when I least expected it.

For many years, the idea of me “knowing” Spanish was a nice little thing you can put in your CV but will probably never use. But then I discovered Reggaeton.

I started listening to J Balvin and Maluma because I liked their music, and I did not care what they were singing about.

I would occasionally open the lyrics so that I could recognize what they say and sing along but I never googled the translation of a single word.

It was just input, input, input until I realized that I actually understand around 70% of every song.

I subscribed to their Instagram and started watching their stories, which I also did NOT understand at first.

To give you guys a little bit more context, Spanish is the second fastest-speaking language in the world after Japanese with a rate of 7.82 syllables per second.

I used to learn Castilian Spanish and those guys are not even Spanish. They are Colombian. They speak with an accent and call each other “parcero”.

But you know what? You just give it some time. Things get better as you get used to the sounds of the language. And then you can start watching Spanish TV shows and movies. And then you can speak it.

So how do you acquire the language?

I’m not saying that grammar is not important. If you’re ever going to use language for something else other than casual communication with locals while traveling, you need to know a proper language structure and you need to be able to spell things correctly. But apparently, starting from the grammar rules is a bad idea.

Thank God for the internet, right? All this information about acquisition connected many dots in my head and I decided to dig deeper. And I discovered a few interesting gentlemen, the polyglots.

One of them is now more than 70 years old, he speaks more than 20 languages and he acquired most of these after the age of…wait for it…

…SIXTY! Sixty freaking years old!

Another gentleman is a TPRS (Teaching Proficiency Through Reading And Storytelling) instructor and a polyglot, who taught himself Arabic (!) in one year.

Of course, their experience is exceptional. The acquisition is still a long process, and most of us won’t have enough time even for two languages, not to mention 20. But if you do want to make it a priority, here are some of my takeaways from these people that will help you acquire any language.

• Do a lot of listening and reading in the target language at the level you would be able to understand. If you’re a total beginner, start with cartoons and children’s books. It is called comprehensible input.
• Get input from the topics that you like. Say, if you are into sports, that’s where you need to start. The process has to excite you.
• Don’t study rules until you can speak. I know from my experience that grammar hinders language production.
• Find yourself a language buddy. I’ll attach a video where a TPRS instructor explains where to look for language buddies and how to organize the acquisition process.
• No corrections, please. If you manage to find someone who can help you, ask them not to correct you. Corrections are ineffective and even harmful to some extent.
• No translation. Children don’t translate things when they acquire a language. You don’t need to translate things either, your goal is to feel the meaning.
• You don’t have to speak to acquire the language. Can’t find the language buddy? No problem. Practice on your own, that’s what I do sometimes. Talking to yourself is fine as long as you are aware that you’re speaking. You’ll eventually communicate with someone, but don’t make it a barrier to acquisition now.
• Commit to the process. Make sure you get at least 30–60 minutes of input in the target language every day. The more, the better, but I’m just being realistic here.

Good luck!

And if you’d like to explore this topic a little bit further, I’m listing all the sources I used for this blog.

1. Freud’s model of the human mind (what is conscious, subconscious, unconscious) http://journalpsyche.org/understanding-the-human-mind/#more-169
2. Language learning vs language acquisition (from the neurolinguistic point)http://www.utesinternationallounge.com/language-acquisition-versus-language-learning/
3. Stephen Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition (with a nice little video explaining how comprehensible input works) https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash-english.html
4. The percentage of verbal and non-verbal in communication https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/beyond-words/201109/is-nonverbal-communication-numbers-game
5. What is TPRS? https://www.tprsbooks.com/what-is-tprs/
6. A TPRS instructor Jeff Brown is talking about how he acquired Arabic in a year (and shares valuable tips)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=illApgaLgGA&t=258s
7. A short interview with a 70+ years old polyglot Steve Kaufmann https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YpvlPbzgnM
8. Ask a Linguist FAQ about children and language acquisition https://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/lang-acq.cfm#speech-lang
9. A peer-reviewed study about the effect of error correction on the learner’s ability to write accurately (spoiler alert! It’s negative) http://epi.sc.edu/ar/AS_4_files/Truscott%202007.pdf

Thanks for reading!