Learning How To Speak Spanish Effectively

Learning how to speak Spanish is not difficult. But it does require a sensible approach. So many people try, and yet they fail miserably at learning how to speak Spanish! Why is this?

The first question to ask is why you are trying to learn Spanish in the first place! Apart from students at school or college taking Spanish classes for exams, most people who are learning the language are doing so for conversational purposes. They are learning to speak Spanish so that they can hold conversations. Perhaps with family or relatives, or perhaps for an upcoming trip! Whatever the reason, their goal is conversational Spanish and not technically correct academic Spanish.

In many cases, they fail because they take an academic approach to a non-academic problem. Strangely, taking an academic approach is the worst way to go about learning how to speak Spanish. An academic approach will teach you all about verbs and conjugation. An academic approach is great for expanding vocabulary. But an academic approach falls short when it comes to holding conversations.

You really need a more natural approach for leaning Spanish at the conversational level. You need much more exposure to sentence structure and conversational scenarios.

So while the failure rate sits at about 85% overall, those who take a more natural approach have much higher success rates. That's correct, only about one in eight who start out generally succeed at learning Spanish in spoken form.

The more natural approach involves real or simulated immersion in spoken Spanish from the very beginning of the learning Spanish endeavor. The most practical way to get this much-needed exposure is to use an online Spanish course that includes effective audio modules.

This can be supplemented using other forms of immersion as well. These are freely available and really help. Listen to Spanish radio! Watch Spanish TV! When you are watching a DVD, watch the Spanish language version with English sub-titles and follow along. You will be amazed at how much real Spanish you pick up, as long as you have used the online Spanish course to give you some basics.

Not all courses are effective, so you need to be careful in your selection. You have to make certain that the audio components of the course will give you the right type of immersion. Audio tool to help you pronounce individual words are sometimes billed as immersion, but that is not the type of immersion which is effective!

Learning Spanish is not hard. The only hard part is carefully choosing an effective approach. Get that right and learning how to speak Spanish is a breeze!

The author is a linguistics expert. Find out more about effective approaches for Learning How To Speak Spanish!