In 2019, I sat down at a coffee shop and penciled out a two-year plan. My goal? To be able to converse fluently in spanish and travel to Central and South America. The original plan was to visit mexico this year, but with Covid, this was not possible – 2020 is nearly finished and I have hit the halfway point.
I am sharing my thoughts with you today on why i started learning, ways I am practicing and how you can succesfully learn another langauge.
How did i start?
I explored Argentina in 2019 and discovered that it was a wonderful place – a different culture to my home country and i felt handicapped because i could not speak spanish. And hence I could not fully comprehend the culture. It appeared that there was alot of latin america travel going on.
I believe that learning another language helps to create associations in your mind (neural pathways) between similar items. Nowadays I can often think of the spanish words instead of their english equivalents.
Recognised school vs Italki
From the onset my goal was to speak as much as possible. A school class costs ~$400 per term for 10 x 2hr lessons which equates to $20 per hour of contact time. However, please note that this time is shared between a class of say 5, so in reality you will only get 20% of this time with the teacher. Also note that if we take the time to travel to/from class ~say 30 minutes. We have spent 3hrs to get 24 minutes of speaking time with the teacher = 24/180 = 13%
Italki Spanish classes (amateur teachers from Colombia) cost an average of $13per hour. There is no need to travel ~ lessons are from the confort of your room. For a 1hr lesson, you are likely at 55minutes of contact time. This is a 92% return of time used to learn spanish.
The clear winner is taking italki classes – a school class is only beneficial if you are in need of making friends. We do not advocate doing language exchange because, even though it is free, it takes time to find a partner and then you need to do a 1:1 time exchange for english. So we take this as less than 50% return of time.
How to maximise your contact hours
We watched a spanish learning video from a ‘polygot’ and essentially what we want to be doing is communicating in our target language – Spanish. What do we mean by communicating? The other person understand what we are trying to say.
There is no point learning grammar etc because your vocabulary is so small that it handicaps you. Try saying I went to bed early in Spanish. You could use proper vocab or you could say bed (cama) and early (temprano) and then some hand actions. The other person would understand.
We want to be mimicking how a baby learns because that’s where we all get started. So pick up a magazine, look at pictures and start describing what is going on in the scene!
If you liked this post I have started up a website http://5percentaday.com/ . Click on the link to find out more!
5 Percent a day 