Learning Spanish

Learning a second language is always a good idea. In the U.S., Spanish is nearly as commonplace as English. Consider this, how often do you hear English repeated in Spanish? That's one reason why it's a good idea to learn Spanish. However, learning a second language is hard for many people. Here are a few useful ideas and tips that will help you if new languages are a bit difficult.

It's much easier to learn from a CD course. They're great if you're a bit shy to learn a new language. You can just listen to how the words are spoken and then used in a sentence. You'll find the CD courses are equal in quality as a classroom, yet there's no stress about making mistakes in front of everyone. Another good reason to invest in a good CD course for learning Spanish is that you can take the courses with you! You can download them to your favorite mp3 player, or simply use a portable CD player and learn while you are on the go! So there's no single location where you must learn. Teach yourself to think in Spanish. You have to use an internal translation process, where you take your thoughts from one language and put them into the new one. Take your time and learn how to do this at your own pace. The idea is to take any internal dialogues you might have into the Spanish equivalent as much as possible. Like any skill, you can become better at it the more you try it. You will get faster at the translation. There will come a point when this will become automatic, and you'll think in Spanish without trying. If you know how to think in Spanish you can work on saying those thoughts out loud--the key to truly interacting in Spanish.

You'll learn faster if you can watch Spanish language TV or movies. Any movie rental store offers foreign language films, and it seems there's no shortage of Spanish TV. You'll be able to learn how Spanish is really spoken without needing to travel. This is helpful if you live somewhere that does not have a large Spanish speaking population to converse with. When you watch, be sure to enable subtitles on. When you think you can understand, then switch them off and check your self. If you keep at it, you'll be learning more and more.

Learning Spanish or any new language does not have to be so painful. Just starting out is the toughest part, but it will get much better in time. Just try to stick with it, and use all the tricks you can find. Soon enough you'll be fluent.