I traveled to Japan for a few weeks last year and had grand plans to learn a bunch of phrases, but got lazy and punked out. I still had a great time, everyone was super kind, but it was embarrassing how well so many folks spoke English and I couldn’t even be assed to put in a bit of work.
My wife is half Mexican and we’re in California, and she gets a lot of people initially talking to her in Spanish, which she can’t speak beyond an ordering food level, and would like to change that.
What’s the best way for us both to get to a beginning conversational level in Spanish? I tried Duolingo a while ago and it was eh, and I’ve heard it’s all AI these days. Any other recommendations?
Use Michel tomas intro to get an understanding of the language grammar and flow
Use Memrise or any flash card software to memorise the top 500 most common words.
Then start watching peppa pig with subtitles
Read simple kids books
Do the above for a couple months, then go to a Spanish class or join hellotalk.
This is the fastest way without full immersion
Check out Dreaming Spanish. They are using Automatic Language Growth method which imitates the way children learn their first language. Instead of learning the mechanics of the language, you naturally absorb it by immersing yourself in native content supplied with lots of context such as gestures, sounds, images etc. The end result is supposed to be developing an intuitive sense of the language and reaching a near native-like level of competence in it.
Live where it is spoken.
watch a series you like so much in another language
Spend a few weeks in Mexico if you can get away for that long. Or consider taking a class (in person, not online) if you don’t mind the issues that entails.
Sesame Street in Spanish is a thing too: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sesame+street+in+spanish
I’ve
sailed the seven seastraveled to different countriesfor old pimsler cd ripsand just talked to peoplebecause I can’t be arsed to leave my houseThey’re very fun chatting along with
aloneon my commutesI’m surprised no one seemed to mention this yet but IMO the best way is to find a good teacher.
Books (preferably with some sort of audio media) and apps can be decent but you need a lot of self-discipline and they won’t adapt to what you are struggling with.
Of course, nothing beats full immersion in a society that only speaks the language you want to learn, but even that, a complete beginner will be much better off with an actual teacher.
Combined-Arms:
EVERY dimension you can stack, syncopating between them, so that whichever leverage works for you, it’s dismantling the unconscious-mind entrenched non-knowing you’re working on displacing.
Pimsleur is the standard for making language automatic.
The problem is that it doesn’t show you how your form the sounds ( may not be your problem, definitely is a problem with more-foreign-languages, for me ).
yt videos in the other languages, showing both simple-basics & social-situations, or whatever it is that you want to be watching ( maybe high-school science would be more interesting to watch than social-drama/stuff ).
Flashcards for getting the has-to-be-imprinted stuff, like verb-tenses, automatic…
intentional-socializing: asking some specific friend/group to help one learn…
Tandem, where you pair-up with someone for sake of learning: you help them learn, & they help you learn…
In short, use every angle/leverage you can, & keep applying them, until the ignorance yields, leaving language-facility in its place.
Young-people are essentially learning-sponges, so this perspective makes no sense for them, but for old people, this is how it works.
Oh, & learn songs, too: they’re learned by one’s non-linguistic hemisphere ( right, for 85% of the population ), so that’s another angle/lever to be using in learning language, too.
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