Learn Spanish Tips

Tips to Help You Learn Spanish

Study every day

Set aside time every day to study. Study in short chunks; you'll learn Spanish faster and with less stress if you study for 30 minutes every day rather than 3 hours once a week.

Review regularly

Go over each of your Spanish lessons several times. If you can arrange it, a good schedule might be once in the morning, once in the evening, and then once a few days later.

Establish a good foundation

Make sure you have a good grasp of Spanish fundamentals before moving on to more advanced material. To learn Spanish most quickly and efficiently, you need to become comfortable with its pronunciation, spelling, and other basics.

Set targets

Set targets ... and make them reasonable ones. Setting and achieving targets will keep you motivated to learn Spanish. You could, for instance, set a time limit to learn a certain lesson, or target a certain level of proficiency before moving on.

Focus on specific interests

Once you are comfortable with the basics of Spanish, learn to talk, write and read about things that interest you personally. This will make it easier for you to remember the words, phrases and grammatical constructions that you encounter.

Don't get discouraged

It will seem at times that you are making fairly rapid progress in learning Spanish, while at other times you seem to standing still or even going backwards. This is normal in language learning. So don't get down about it, but when it feels as if you are making little
progress, try going over earlier lessons. You may find that they're much easier now than when you first studied them, which will boost your confidence and motivate you to continue to learn Spanish.

Don't worry about mistakes

Making mistakes as you work to learn Spanish is not anything to worry about or beat youself up over. What matters is getting your message across, not whether you use all the right words, tenses, etc. If you can't recall the exact words, try using other ones; in Spanish, as in other languages, there's usually more than one way to explain or describe something.

Have fun

Find ways to make learning Spanish fun. Learn or make up songs, games, stories, jokes and anything else you can think of.

Take your language to the next level

Subscribe to a printed or audio version of a Spanish-language magazine. Try out one of the many audio or computer-based Spanish courses available (elsewhere, I have reviewed my top-recommended one).

Good luck! ¡Buena suerte!