Mi experiencia de aprender español

It’s the first language I’m genuinely learning after failed attempts with French in college and Kannada in Bangalore. Honestly, it was a little uncomfortable to come to Chile knowing no Spanish at all. In the last 2 months, my Spanish has definitely improved and I want to keep working on it every day.

Spanish

It’s more informal and musical than English. Easier to learn than many other languages mainly because it’s phonetic and has a lot of cognates with English. What makes it tough though are the conjugations (Sanskrit deja vu after 14 years!) and the irregular verbs.

Chilenos speak Spanish with some nuances. The most important is pronunciations when they skip pronouncing “s” in “Nos Vemos” and just call it “No Vemo”. Also, there are words which exist only in Chile e.g. bacan (cool), cachai (understand).

Learning a language is not all fun

Like any other skill, it takes patience and discipline and I haven’t been motivated all the time. Examples a) when I was just learning vocab and not ready to create sentences b) when the book started focusing on different tenses and grammar nuances.

How have I tried to learn so far?

1. Duolingo: Went through 12 chapters but didn’t like it much. It was a little too robotic for my taste. Given it’s the most popular app, I didn’t even bother exploring others.
2. Spanish Book: We got a Spanish coursebook (basic level) from the EODP program. It is reasonably good with a lot of pictures. I am still reading it but kind of got a little bored after a while and don’t treat it as the primary resource anymore.
3. Talking to people: Kind of obvious that the best way is to just speak with people more. For me, a very good intermediate step to face-to-face communications (which is daunting for beginners) has been emails and WhatsApp chats in Spanish, where I get more time to process. This fits perfectly for the weekend travel planning.
4. Learning buddy: Sakshi and I have talked about practicing Spanish at home but we’ve shown terrible discipline till now :(
5. Overhearing people: I do this all the time in my school with the kids and in teachers’ room. A very good exercise to polish pronunciations and hear gossip sometimes (esp. because some people think I still understand no Spanish)
6. Entertainment: I thought one of the more realistic ways to learn would be do a usual daily activity but in Spanish. I tried 4 things: radio, music, Spanish movies and TV. None of them really worked out: Radio/TV are boring for me and not something I would usually do anyways, music/movies are good but either the speed is too fast and/or I stop enjoying the actual thing by focusing on the words. I still listen to some Spanish music (most recently, Chilean folk) and see Spanish movies, but not consciously trying to learn the language.
7. Children’s Book: I love reading, so I bought a popular Children’s book, El Principito. Although I read at a pace of 3–4 pages an hour, it’s fun. Great thing is that the dictionary in Kindle lets me just read without using an online translator.
8. Comprehensions: What I like most in that Spanish coursebook are comprehensions with dialogues. So, as I started spending less time on the book overall, I’ve started reading many more online comprehensions. The audio recordings with some help with listening.
9. Web: It was a habit to translate the Spanish websites, esp. when reading about travel, mostly because I typically skim through a lot and it’s too time consuming to read in Spanish, even if I partially could. From last couple of weeks, I’ve forced myself to stop translating entire websites and rather spend time to practice.

General recommendations for language learning

1. Keep it fun: To maintain your motivation over a long period of time
2. Embrace imperfection: It’s how a baby learns, so don’t over-complicate it just because you’re an adult
3. Don’t overuse the translator: Although they are super useful, don’t start relying on them all the time. And yes, SpanishDict is much better than Google translator!