best place to learn spanish “Finally! An Easy Way to Get By in Spanish – And You Only Need 138 Words“ Click Here 👈 Choose your P...
best place to learn spanish
“Finally! An Easy Way to Get By in Spanish – And You Only Need 138 Words“ Click Here 👈
I can't believe this is my first video talking about Spanish but here we are I'm one of those rare cases who didn't take Spanish in high school what do you want from me I have family in France anyway I half-heartedly studied a little Spanish about a decade ago when I worked for a large language learning software company named after historical artifact written in three scripts and two languages neither of which they teach and that was really just because I was leaving a lot of money on the table when I worked on commission because people would walk up and say AB and I'd be like uh and they would take their money elsewhere but when I was like they would buy the software but my heart wasn't in it and I'm basically the only person in the Linguistics and language learning space especially on YouTube who doesn't really speak Spanish to the point that I tried to use Spanish as an example in a video and instead just used imagined romance I dredged up from my subconscious mixing French Italian Portuguese and straight up Latin like some sort of crafty and linguistic monstrosity but now I really want to get down to it and while I loathe the language in three months guys Spanish is one that I think I could probably get comfortable with pretty quickly so I'll tell you what I'm probably going to do but more importantly I'll tell you what I would do if I were starting fresh and didn't have a PhD in linguistics and familiarity with other romance languages not only that but I'll give options for both those willing to invest a little bit of money and for those only willing to invest time I'm also building on the lessons learned from my 3 Month studying Persian during which I learned a lot but I did not achieve my speaking goals so I've revised my advice especially around things like Anki that reminds me if you're new to the channel welcome I'm Dr Taylor Jones I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania I speak a handful of languages and I think language and cultur are endlessly interesting here on the channel I try to share why that is with an eye to both pointing out really weird and unexpected ways that languages work and also answering the questions that people have about languages language learning and Linguistics and today I'm finally giving in we're going to learn Spanish in fact I might make a video in a few months for a before and after or 7even days if I'm feeling squarely this is language [Music] Jones today's video actually has a sponsor which I thought long and hard about before agreeing to you don't have to use them and I'll talk about a wide variety of other methods in the rest of the video but I am endorsing them because I've used their product I've assessed it and I believe it to be effective and frankly I found it tremendously fun I specifically wrote into our agreement that I reserved the right to give an honest review including any flaws and shortcomings and they agreed so today's video is sponsored by lingoda lingoda is an online language school with five languages and one of them is Spanish they have a very thorough and well put together course that can get you from absolute beginner to C1 in some of the languages they offer the basic idea is to create create a space where you can start talking from day one learning in small group and sometimes individual sessions with native speakers they have a well organized course that provides enough context and vocabulary for a jumping off point for conversations in your target language with teachers from around the world I used them for Spanish as a beginner and for French where I took some of their B2 level content and I was impressed with both they offer different tracks including an intensive Sprint which I believe Elise speaks did before doing a C2 exam and Flex which is more my speed since planning around a toddler is hard there's also teams with a more fixed class time with a guaranteed completion of a sublevel in 8 to 12 weeks learning a language can be hard and I really appreciate that they recognize that and try to take the hard work out of it I promised I'd talk downside too so most of them are on our end as Learners I found it hard to make the time to consistently study with them for an hour at a time especially to prioritize Spanish well I do have difficulty scheduling because I have a toddler they do have classes 2 4 7 so even if it's hard to find time you can find the time maybe at like 3:00 a.m. the only real criticism I can give from what I've seen so far is that I once had a Chilean tutor with him who said Spanish words always have a higher pitch on the stressed syllable like Spanish has pitch accent or something turns out Chilean Spanish kind of does but it's an outlier there and the Learners I'm sure will go on to work with other teachers from around the world so it could be confusing at first but they'll get the hang of it and in case this wasn't clear being exposed to Accents like Chile and Spanish is going to be tremendously helpful in the long run even if you don't want to go to Chile so it's not free it requires an investment of time and energy and a modum of consistency but you do really get your money's worth if you feel like giving them a shot click my link or use my code Jones 20 for up to20 or equivalent off and up to 20 private classes when you sign up for Flex okay so back to the video whether you use lingoda or not here's what I would do first I'm going to assume you're starting from scratch you know the saying this isn't my first rodeo well Spanish is often people's first rodeo and for most English speakers that means you have to learn the basics of grammar while learning a different language because most of us don't learn grammar in school or didn't pay attention this might even be your first time learning about language capital L so a few things are really important to know going into this but first a bit of a road map we're going to need to understand the sounds of Spanish the structure of Spanish how to memorize how to practice improvising and where to find interesting things in Spanish otherwise why are we even learning it first languages are both practically infinite with more words than you could ever hope to learn and an infinite generative capacity to say new and interesting things and also simultaneously finite I've talked about the ideas behind generative Linguistics before but the takeaway for this is that we do all the infinite stuff with a handful of building blocks but the building blocks of Spanish are put together a little different than English the building blocks of any language are the sounds the phonological inventory and how they go together and then the pieces of words Mor FES and then the words and bigger structures like phrases and sentences historically it would have been really important to me to sound authentic authentico whatever that means and I would have wanted to imitate an accent I thought people would respect don't get me wrong I don't want a thick English accent like Mike Bloomberg but Spanish is a colonial language spoken by hundreds of millions of people so there's a bewildering Cornucopia of vacin to choose from Mo ESO k estando at the end of the day you just need to pick something and stick with it and a generic educated accent will be fine I'll be doing a generic Latin American accent because I don't feel any need to go to Spain and frankly I doubt they'd want me there anyway I'm honestly thinking of global Spanish as just shy of being a con at this point kind of like English I'm not going to fool anyone into thinking I'm from somewhere I'm not and cool and local and all that and honestly any good spy which I'm not could tell you that it's better to speak well and be obviously a foreigner who speaks well than to be suspiciously too locally knowledgeable so my initial goal is to just sound good with normal speech and communicate intelligently not sound aidite and wow people with my impressive vocabulary and massive stock of synonyms I need to recognize as much as possible but that doesn't mean I have to talk all that mess I'll be happy if I can do the equivalent of calling something a light blue like the sky or a bird's egg not getting into the shades of difference between whether it was really a cornflower blue or a robin egg or maybe more of a Cerulean and not a Lapis lapis same goes for basically everything there's a rich vocabulary of emotions and colors that I'll need to recognize but frankly I don't even use an English leave me a comment by the way with your favorite overly specific color term or emotion word you know for the algorithm for the phology I would just peruse Wikipedia if you don't know the International Phonetic Alphabet this is where a lot of listening practice comes in as a linguist I'll probably be slowing down audio and audacity or even analyzing spectrograms in Pro both of these are free resources or even more fun just using my training and my ears but if you're a regular person maybe try something like shadowing or recording yourself and comparing to someone you wouldn't mind sounding like every now and then this means using the AI translation tool on Gilbert Godfrey's voice is probably non-starter unless you're into that kind of thing all that talk about the finite nature of the generative tools of Spanish boils down to get a decent grammar I have the rootage essential grammars for a handful of languages and I like them I got the more comprehensive grammar for Spanish out of curiosity and also because one of the authors is named but when you have a name that kids in the playground will make fun of I feel like it makes you a more thorough and serious scholar this is not scientific it's just a bias I have but so far I like big I like I like but's big book I cannot lie it's just got a great explanation of the benefits and uses of the subjunctive that casts doubt on the whole it's just about casting doubt nonsense and it frequently compares to French which is great for me I'm going to use lingoda for my speaking and interacting but you don't have to there are quite a few online platforms both paid and free for speaking practice some of which I've even endorsed on other videos but a couple of Decades of trying to learn a language without interacting with real people and I can tell you with certainty you need to interact with real people you can't just disappear from social media for a month and come back fluent because you had an AI tutor language hacking is not a thing stop trying to make it a thing it's not a thing so here's the deal so far all of this is getting exposure but exposure is not enough I have to get the Spanish into my skull so that means memorization I've mentioned this elsewhere and I'll probably do a full guide later but memorization is its own entire subdiscipline in the science of learning I'm going to need to consistently review words both recognizing and producing and the way I prefer to do that is with digital flash cards using the very Advanced science of space repetition software you can literally make a version out of SRS in a shoe box with real cards so that last part was a joke for this I like Ani in addition it helps to memorize nouns with their genders it helps to use images where possible and it helps to make everything as memorable as possible I hate that this is true but pneumonics actually work also tapping into your amydala by using things that evoke sex violence fear excitement and so on also work in practice this means I'm partial to what I call naughty neonics and that my ony Decks that have pictures are not ones I'd always do on the bus I don't want to have to explain the random sexually suggestive or violent or scary pictures I use despite the fact that I do keep it an absolutely hard PG-13 at the spiciest we're trying to be polyglots not poly goons right right anyway one thing to remember is the recognition and production asymmetry I can easily recognize that pararo is bird but I have a harder time actually producing the word and an even harder time remembering that it's always masculine and evidently an even harder time not aspirating that PE so when I see a card that says Alo I can defer review of that much longer than the one that says [Music] bird I'm not going to lie I'm also going to be trying to speedrun as much of du lingo as I can to see words in context I'm even using the Dual lingo ankey deck as my primary anky deck though I might make another based on this book that I like the real Ultimate the ultimate Spanish review and practice I'll link all the books in the description I have the paid version of dual lingo the unpaid just means that you'd better not make any mistakes for Ani my preferences are to use audio to ensure that I have production cards where I actually have to generate the words I'm learning and to memorize chunks not just individual words so two-word phrases Etc byrams and trigrams baby when I was studying Persian I tried to use close deletion on entire sentences I found that doesn't work for me especially when I went back to it and I realized that I had really no idea what was going on and even worse is just translating full sentences back and forth so at this point I find I do better with individual words or couple word phrases on top of all of that I plan to immerse myself in real life Spanish materials not actual immersion without the expectation of understanding everything up front but just as a way of attuning my ears to different accents reinforcing the words and structures that I do know and get a few easy words from Context I have cable TV because I'm an old man so I can watch unibiz and so on but I also have Netflix and YouTube and another sponsor that I sometimes mention that does a lot of TV and media stuff you don't have to go the paid route especially for a language like Spanish and Beyond TV there's a lot of stuff like podcast in Spanish I Can Read Wikipedia on things that interest me and the pop Science magazine mu interesante tends to live up to its name I definitely wouldn't recommend this approach for every language but for English speakers learning something like Spanish there is an embarrassment of riches we are drowning in Spanish content some politicians would even say there's too much I'm also setting myself a short time frame since this is not necessarily my passion and a goal I'm going to make a video in Spanish in a few months lastly I'm planning so that I can be consistent with the meat and potatoes of my study anid deck basic vocab and an understanding of the grammatical system so let's summarize what I would recommend for anyone before we even talk about the process of learning recognize that Spanish is spoken by hundreds of millions of people so we can take some of the pressure off of ourselves it's in the running for Universal basic recognize that there's a lot of what I call freebies and be on the lookout for them when first starting start by making sure you have a decent grasp of the admittedly fairly simple phology pick an accent your resources are likely to do this for you and don't worry about doing anything other than getting decent pronunciation so people understand you without struggling also make sure you know where to get grammatical questions answered I love a good grammar but there's also tons of free resources on the internet pick a primary study resource this can be a textbook du lingo Rosetta Stone or classes like with lingoda it could even be just mainlining YouTube videos as one word at a time has shown can be effective in a few months then don't just study to understand the concept and recognize the word but actually study to memorize this is the hard one for me so I use Anki any space repetition software space repetition shoe box will do lockbox a lock boox be consistent in the primary study and even more importantly primary memorization approach in addition look for fun things in the language and engage with content that's interesting for you podcasts TV movies Wikipedia and other print media this should be your new habit scrolling on your phone scroll in Spanish but also like you can live your life without having to do this all Spanish all the time that's basically it and that's what I'm going to do as with most things in life the more money you have to throw at the problem the easier things are I definitely recommend lingoda some grammar book books and various subscriptions however if you're on a shooring budget I'll guess that since you're watching this you have internet access in that case YouTube videos Anki on a desktop pulling audio from forvo and images from Google and not the paid version of Anki for your phone the free versions of dual lingo but be careful about your mistakes and a willingness to snatch up whatever Spanish language content you can find online for free should still do the trick especially if you're furiously Googling things like order of pronouns in Spanish as I did recently so let's do this I'll come back in a few months and we can all see how I did we can see how you did and I'll link that video in the description here and if you're learning Spanish leave me a comment with which of these tips you think will help you the most if you like what I'm doing with the Channel please like And subscribe and leave a comment if you leave it in Spanish I'll read it and respond in a few months check out some of my other videos by the way YouTube thinks that you'll like this one if you'd like to support the channel you can right here on YouTube with super thanks and Super Chat or on patreon at www.patreon.com language Jones or langues langu until next time ...
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