What are some tricks I can use to learn Spanish rapidly?

Answer 1

I have prepared students for fluent Spanish in just 8 weeks. One was from February 13th to April 10th 2019. We spent 6 days a week doing the following:

1. Going through required lesson material (~1 hour per day)
2. Writing sentences based on lesson material (~30 min per day)
3. Listening to Spanish dialogues, songs, watching videos, etc and translating them (30 min to 1 hour per day — we didn’t do this as much starting out, but did it more and more as time went on)
4. Talking to speaking coaches (1 hour every other day in the beginning, but near the end I did this more often)
5. Spamming my Spanish speaking Facebook friends with Spanish chat messages to get more practice (varies).

It's definitely possible to learn at an accelerated pace despite what others may tell you.

So, how do you 'hack' Spanish?

1. Learn the most frequently used words first.

I was recently browsing through videos of first and second semester Spanish dialogues online. There were some really strange parallels in the material that students usually learned in their first several weeks of class. Here were some common first words and phrases learned:

1. Una cerveza para mí (One beer for me)
2. El árbol (The tree)
3. La biblioteca (The library)
4. Qué hora es? (What time is it?)

Most courses have a completely arbitrary priority when it comes to sequence of material, and inefficient sequencing can put off students because they think they have to memorize thousands of random words before they can speak.

Not true. In English, just 300 words make up 65% of all written material. Spanish is no different — here are the 1000 most frequent Spanish words (generated from a list of 27.4 million words found in common Spanish movies and TV shows) that make up 80-90% of all Spanish verbal communication. Studying and mastering the common words first can drastically cut down the time to fluency.

2. Start off talking in Spanglish

There’s this weird notion in most foreign language courses that you need to start learning full sentences in that language as soon as possible.

As my student started to learn the fundamental building blocks of Spanish (i.e. conjunctions, prepositions, basic verbs, etc), she needed to first understand how they functioned within a sentence. It’s important to focus on understanding the function of these words in a sentence before worrying about other words in that sentence.