My Spanish is like that - my vocab is about a hundred words and I'm very comfortable using it but native speakers are not amused and there have been cases when I literally was asked to speak any other language
Many people may feel Spanish is difficult if they're not comfortable with learning languages. Perhaps you heard it's best to learn Spanish because it's an easy language. The truth is that most languages are easy to learn, you just have to figure out what kind of learning tricks you want to use to make the process simpler. There are many tips and suggestions to make your learning a lot easier.
Coming from a Spanish speaking country, I don't think this is true. Most of the people that speak it well here can because they were taught from school since they were little. I see every adult struggling with it because it's just hard to make any sense out of it. There are waaay too many special cases. It's like a programming language filled with keywords and combination of keywords that you must understand intuitively because there are so many rules and exceptions that you can't just learn it by heart.
Spanish is easy except for those pesky conjugations.
But, do you know how hard it is to fluidly conjugate into 50 verb forms in spoken speech?
Plus, people gloss over this fact, but Spanish is highly inflected. After you choose 1 out of 50 conjugation for your form, you have to choose a gender for your noun, and inflect your adjectives by number and gender. Conceptually, it’s not difficult. But if you open your mouth and starting try to talk this way you’ll mess up for about the first 5 years.
I can do it. But of course a language which I know seems easy to me!
But point taken that most languages have conjugations + all that other stuff, too.
Learning Spanish was the same for me. Learning character pronunciations and where to place emphasis is incredibly easy. Once you have that down you can pronounce or spell almost any word.
Every person I’ve talked to who’s learned English as a second language told me it was pretty easy. There’s lots of weird shit to learn to truly master it, but to learn enough to speak conversationally is easy, I’ve been told. When I was in Costa Rica learning Spanish, the folks there pitied me since they thought learning Spanish would be difficult. Funnily enough, in contrast I thought it wasn’t so hard: having clear rules for verb conjugation and tenses, few irregular words I needed to learn, and very regular pronunciation. If I wasn’t so rusty I might still even remember all 14 tenses.
Funny anecdote, when I was in Central America learning Spanish, everyone from the country I was in thought that learning Spanish would be way harder than learning English, what with 14 different verb tenses to learn and all that. The folks I talked to thought generally English was much simpler than Spanish.
I hear you. People keep saying Spanish is an easier language than English, but yesterday I pulled up an article written in Spanish and I couldn't even read the first word.
I think it's kind of like as a portuguese speaker I can never learn to speak spanish properly. It's easy enough to understand, but I can never remember the different words because it's too similar to compartmentalize.
(1) Watch Spanish TV/Movies
(2) Talk in Spanish to Spanish-speaking people (use appropriately)
(3) Learn the easy small words first
(4) Immediately apply and integrate what you learn with what you already know.
Note: The Spanish I learned in high school was enough for me to be able to speak and understand it fluently (6 semesters). Also note that I can understand several different languages fluently. This may have helped me learn faster than most other people. I say understand because my American accent is too thick to be able to speak in all of those languages with the proper accent.
Spanish is definitely more easy to grasp than French. There are a few traps in the road and many variants, but phonetically is much simpler. You can recite any text in standard spanish correctly in a day even if you do not understand a word of what you are saying. The main problem in this sense is the local vocabulary and idioms. American spanish is extremely diverse and rich in terms and meanings.
I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.
I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.
I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.
Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.
Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.
And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.
Practice. Do some learning, and then practice again.
You're already at a disadvantage since you're not seven years old (five to seven is the best age to learn a language, according to linguists), so you're gonna need to make up some ground. Aside from picking a learning program to pick up vocabulary, you need to practice, and do it in as many ways as you can.
Some suggestions I/friends have used:
Mass Media. Start buying a Spanish-language newspaper and reading articles (specifically, articles that you don't know what they're about) with a dictionary in hand. The first few you do will take an hour each for a two-line article. But as you do this for longer times, you'll start to pick up words - and (mainstream, well-regarded) newspapers are great because they've generally got very clear writing. When you get confident, start trying to read the letters or editorials. You should also dedicate an hour of the day to watching news or a soap opera on Univision (doesn't matter if you don't understand it at first - pay attention and you'll pick it up), and pick up a Spanish radio station to start listening to.
Computers. Set your OS's language to Spanish, and set Spanish as the preferred language of your browser (so it will request es pages before en ones). When you don't understand a web page, get out the dictionary and work through it. Try and limit yourself to Spanish sites as much as possible, and (most importantly) read all your online news in Spanish.
People. If you can find some people to speak to in Spanish on a daily basis, do this. To complement this, find a local cafe/restaurant that has acceptable food and Spanish-speaking staff, and become a regular there. Practice at home, and then go there an order in Spanish. Do this a lot (hence the OK food). After you're feeling OK about this, go to this place at off-hours, order something (in Spanish, of course) and try to make some small talk. These people should be familiar with you by this point, and be amenable to talking to a customer (since they don't have anything else to do). At first, they'll likely respond to your broken Spanish in English - either respond back only Spanish, or ask them to speak Spanish to you directly. They see this as being nice and helpful; they're not trying to insult your skills, and will likely accommodate you if you ask (and they recognize you).
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