How to Learn Spanish in 2021 ｜ 5 Tips to Make Language Learning Fun, Effective, & Immersive at Home

Hello language learners and happy new year. Feliz año nuevo a todos. 2020 was definitely a pretty rough year but 2021 is here full of hope and new possibilities and one of those possibilities is language learning. I'm sure many people have created language pledges, new year's resolutions to make this the year that you finally learn Spanish or some other language that you love. But language learning can be really tough because it's just one of those processes that you have to and if you don't have strategies that are both fun and effective it can be tough to get to your goals before losing motivation. Now I tried to learn Spanish for many years through school and I got to a point where I felt stuck at a level that I wasn't satisfied with and I felt like I wasn't making any more progress. But back this time in January 2020 I made a personal commitment that I was finally gonna learn Spanish just to get to a level where I could feel comfortable doing things like watching a Netflix movie all in Spanish without subtitles and understand what's going on, be able to read news articles and things like that or to be able to write a paper and actually give it to friends without feeling like they're gonna come at me for my grammar errors. And I also wanted to be able to go to a Spanish-speaking country and feel comfortable walking around knowing that if I get into conversations with people on the streets or in a government building someplace formal that I could jump into conversations and feel comfortable and do well. Now one year later I'm really shocked at the sheer amount of joy that's come from not only hitting my goals and getting to a place where I felt more comfortable with the language but from the process itself I got to go to Spain for a few months and I picked up some really great strategies that I've brought back home now with me back in the U.S. and they've been really helping me to accelerate my language learning at a level that feels really fun and engaging. Now in this video we're going to cover five useful tips to make language learning fun and effective at the same time so that you can hit your goals while also just enjoying the process and the beauty of language learning in general. These five tips made a good chunk of what I've been doing the past year and I hope that they can be effective for you as well in your own language learning journey. Hello language lovers and welcome to my channel. My name is Jerry and this channel is for anyone interested in learning Spanish or just interested in language learning in general. I'm a huge fan of the Spanish language because I'm much better at it in the past year and I've learned some really useful tips and strategies along the way. As I continue diving further into Spanish this year I want to share some of the tips, the experiences, and strategies that I'm using that are fun and effective for me with the hopes that they'll arm you with tools you can use to make language learning fun for yourself and hit some of your goals. My hope is to create a new video each week covering different language topics that people are interested in whether it's Spanish for beginners, intermediates, or advanced students and I've noticed in particular that as you get more intermediate it becomes more difficult to find resources that are organized and structured and so one thing that I might do is share some resources for intermediate students to help you cross that intermediate plateau. Now in today's video we'll cover five core tips that I used in my own language learning journey this past year and I'll structure the video by first sharing the tip and the intention behind it. Then I'll give some examples of how I applied it to my own journey and finally I'll give you some concrete examples of things you can do right away after watching this video to apply it for yourself. So without any further ado let's dive in. To foreshadow these tips I want to cover one key aspect of language learning. Learning a new language usually comes down to four key things. The first two are reading and listening and we can categorize these skills as interpretation in the sense that you're interpreting ideas, words, and phrases that are put out by other people and just trying to understand them and take them in for yourself. The last two are writing and speaking and we can categorize these as expression in the sense that you're now taking the hundreds or thousands of words that you know and combining ideas you have in your head into concrete phrases that you can share with the world at lightning speed and this is the part that is usually most challenging because you're kind of getting off the cuff but it's usually the part that people have most fun with because this is the part where you're actually talking to people and it's super empowering because now you can express yourself in a new language that you couldn't before. So as we explore the five tips I'll be sure to touch back on these elements of language learning just to contextualize them a bit more. Okay, no me enrollo mas. Tip number one. Tip number one. Interact with Spanish regularly throughout the day not just during study periods. One of the first things you can do is to create regular touch points in your everyday life and routine that introduce you to and then reinforce different words and phrases in Spanish and it's effective to keep reinforcing the Spanish throughout the day rather than only relying on a set concentrated time where you sit down and study and then kind of close the books. This touches a bit on notions of spaced repetition wherein as soon as you learn a new word or a new concept you immediately start to forget it unless you start to use it and then reinforce it. Let's imagine you learn the word confinamiento. Now the moment that you learn this word and you move away from it you'll start to forget it rather quickly and if you don't have occasions where this word is repeated to you or you hit it yourself, say the next day, two days after, four days after, a week later, you may completely forget even learning the word in the first place. Now let's imagine the next day you take out your phone and you see a notification for a news article with the word confinamiento in the title. That immediately starts to reinforce the word that you learned the previous day and you start to have a recollection and a stronger connection to the word. Now let's imagine you're watching a TV show the following day and you hear the newscaster say something about confinamiento. Again it rings a bell in your ears and you form another stronger association with that word. Now if these repetition events continue to happen you'll soon have a new word kind of locked away in your arsenal that you're very comfortable with, that you understand, and that you can readily use in conversations yourself. This goes back a bit to the notion of use it or lose it in the sense that our brains are optimized to keep what's important and throw out what's not and one of the ways that we teach our brain what's important is frequency, just showing it that thing more often. That's one of the main benefits of immersion programs which is that they surround you with native speakers who are saying a lot of the same phrases and words around you very often so those phrases and words are becoming very reinforced over and over and over again helping you learn the language. There's another subtle but very powerful aspect of spreading Spanish out throughout your day and throughout your daily routine which is that Spanish slowly starts to take a normal part of your life and meld into your identity and this is an awesome space to get into because then it becomes not just a language that you're studying or something that you do as a to-do every day but it becomes something that is a part of you and you learn it because it's a part of who you are and that helps you in the long term stay interested and staying engaged and have fun with the learning process. Okay, so what are some very practical things you can do right now to act on this tip? It's simple, find things around you that you use frequently that you can incorporate Spanish into. For me, three things that I changed right away were my phone, my laptop, and some popular accounts that I use. I'll go through Google as an example because that was one change that I made that resulted in me suddenly seeing Spanish across YouTube, search, and various other services. It really was awesome because just these few changes sort of sprinkled Spanish throughout my day and I started being introduced to new words and phrases without necessarily even having to seek them out. For the iPhone, it's pretty simple. You head to settings, then general, scroll down to language and region, and tap on iPhone language. Then you can search for Spanish and choose the Spanish dialect that you're interested in studying. For the Mac, it's pretty simple too. Click on the Apple logo in the top left corner, hit the system preferences, and then language and region, and you'll find the option to add a new language and set it as your main. Google's pretty simple too. Just sign into your Google account, click on your icon in the top right corner, and then click administer your account. Head down to data and personalization, and then scroll all the way down to language, and you can click edit and change that to Spanish. Some of these processes require you to restart your device, which actually turned out to be a cool deterrent for me because in the beginning I wanted to change some of them and this was enough of a deterrent for me not to do so. Let's dive into tip number two. Tip number two, use TV to learn niche vocabulary and make language learning stealthily fun. Watching a great TV show with characters that suck you in and a plot line that keeps you flipping through episodes has quickly become one of my favorite ways of learning Spanish. It's super fun to relax through a good series, and it's cool because you can actually learn a lot of niche vocabulary that you might not learn otherwise. For example, watching a murder mystery about a group of passengers stuck aboard a ship taught me a lot of new vocabulary about ships and directional navigation. Words like camarote for cabin, cubierta for ship deck, vavor for port, and estribor for starboard. And navigation phrases like ponga rumbo al oeste for set course for west. And I honestly don't think I would have learned any of these words if it hadn't been for this Netflix series. Watching shows that are originally shot in Spanish are also great because it gives you connections to actors and actresses and the film culture of that country, and that gives you a good incentive to do things like search up movie reviews or interviews with actors and actresses that are usually shot in Spanish because those are the audiences that they're intended for. So it's a great way to help you learn additional things out of interest. And finally, shows give you a great mix of different registers of spoken Spanish. I know for myself, studying Spanish usually led to me learning more formal styles and things that were less likely to be said in colloquial conversations, but Netflix series did a great job of teaching me more colloquial styles and things that you're more likely to actually hear on the streets and use in an everyday conversation. In the same show, you'll have a judge, professor, and a teenager all having conversations in different registers perhaps, and this is great because it gives you a chance to hear the differences between all the different ways of speaking and use them yourself. And this is more realistic because you will likely come across different situations where you need to do different speaking registers in your own life, so this is great for rounding out your Spanish. So how do we get the most out of watching shows? The most effective for me has been to use Netflix to find shows originally shot in Spanish and then setting them to Spanish audio with Spanish subtitles. If you set English subtitles, a lot of times you can end up blocking out the sound in just reading, which is not as effective. This will be great for working especially in your listening skills, but it can also work your reading skills if you're reading subtitles along as well. But to take this up a notch further, I actually started doing something new recently when I watched shows, which is repeating the phrases that I'm hearing and reading. This is a cool little hack that you can use to practice speaking because your favorite characters are feeding you the lines and all you have to do is kind of say them back and you get more comfortable speaking at a faster pace and your pronunciation also improves. So I recommend you tap that strategy on when you get more comfortable with listening and reading as well. Okay, now for practical recommendations. I'll show you one way you can find shows yourself and leave you with three Netflix recommendations. If you navigate to Netflix and do a search for Spanish TV shows, you'll find a predefined tag that will take you to a list of shows originally shot and produced in Spanish and these will be great for teaching you natural phrases and words as spoken by Spanish natives. Now, three of my own personal recommendations at number three is La Casa de Papel. This is a super popular show about a bank robbery that's blown up internationally and if you ask anyone for series recommendations, you will definitely hear this one. My second favorite is less known but I consider it a gem. It's called La Catedral del Mar and it's about an ordinary man living in feudal Barcelona and it does a great job of diving into the whole feudal ages theme. It's very Game of Thrones-esque. It's a super short series. It's one season but it brings out a lot of emotions and one of my favorites. And my current favorite, probably because I'm watching it now, is Vis a Vis. It follows the life of a falsely convicted woman as she goes through being convicted, building a new life in prison, and then all of the things that that creates. I hear a lot of similarities between Vis a Vis and Orange is the New Black. With that, we can jump into tip number three. Build Spanish music playlists for all of your activities. If there's something more powerful than shows, it's probably music. Music is super fundamental to who we are as humans and some suggest that the gene markers for recognizing music and rhythm are actually more deeply ingrained in our genome than the markers for speech itself. So the intention here is pretty simple. Find artists with styles that you like that can fit into your day. Styles that will allow you to get lost in the music and forget that you're even learning a language in the process. It's best if you can find artists for different moods. So you have a Spanish dance playlist, Spanish cooking playlist, the Spanish workout playlist, whatever it is that you do in your day. This will again help you create more touch points with Spanish throughout your day because you'll have different playlists for different occasions. This also gives you a deeper connection to the Spanish-speaking world by connecting with artists. While it might be tougher to learn grammatical structures through songs, you'll learn a more poetic side of the Spanish language, which is super beautiful. Listening to music touches on listening skills, but it can also turn into a speaking exercise if you get into the songs enough to try to sing along. My personal journey to employing music in my own language learning went something like this. I browsed on Spotify for Spanish songs and saved the ones that I liked, that interesting styles and melodies, even if I didn't necessarily understand the lyrics at the time. Then I eventually started building playlists with different vibes that I would use for different activities. Things for studying, working out, things for dance, late night vibes, and I'd just go about my day and have songs playing in the background. Eventually, I got really into a couple of songs and started to hum along and then eventually looked up the words and started to memorize song lyrics. Without realizing it, I ended up memorizing tons of Spanish lines just because I was interested in the song itself. So the language benefits came as a bonus. I'll give you three artist recommendations and then you can branch out from there and find other artists that you like. First up, Rey. It's a Mexican band formed in 2003 and they have a lot of great songs that are really slow, so you can really catch the lyrics. It's an awesome band for a reflective late night kind of vibe. Next up, Vicente Garcia. He's a Dominican singer with songs that are a bit more upbeat and have some more danceability to them. He also has a smooth Caribbean style vibe. And finally, Diego El Tigala. He's a legendary flamenco artist from Madrid. His songs tend to have a lot of energy to them and just an incredible amount of artistry. Definitely a great artist to look up. Now, on to tip number four. Tip number four, read Spanish from local and international sources. News articles are great because they give you a more academic register of Spanish and they introduce you to a lot of geo-sociopolitical vocabulary that you might not see elsewhere. Words like, figures, or opinion polls, or GDP, gross domestic product. At the same time, you learn about things that are happening around the world from a perspective outside of your country. I actually remember reading about the SpaceX launch when I was in Spain and it was super cool to see and read from a different cultural perspective. Now, to make this practical, I'll recommend two categories of news apps and sites for you to try and let you explore to find the sources that you like to read. The first source is to download native news sources in the Spanish-speaking country of your choice. I got to try a few different ones while I was in Spain, Diario ABC, El Mundo, y El País, the three that I tried. But if you select the Spanish-speaking country of your choice, you can look up the local news sources that are there and see if they have apps that you can download or websites that you can use. The second source is to use the Spanish version of news sources that you already read. I know, for example, that the New York Times is a Spanish version and I did a quick search and saw that the Huffington Post, I think, also has a Spanish version. So do a quick search to see if the news sources you already read have a Spanish version that you can add on to your day. On to tip number five. Tip number five, speak to others and speak to yourself in Spanish. Speaking is one of the most fun ways to learn Spanish because, after all, you're most likely learning the language because you want to communicate with other people. And speaking helps you lock down on some of the most common words and phrases that are used in conversations, things like greetings, talking about weekends, sharing opinions. These common words and phrases will really get cemented into your brain as you have more and more conversations because you'll start to see that there's patterns that kind of repeat over and over again. Conversations are awesome because you practice your listening skills while at the same time working your speaking skills and you're hopefully engaging in a fun conversation with someone else. But this can also be one of the toughest of the five tips to implement just because you might not have Spanish speakers around you. That was my case when I came back to the US and so I will give you a few tips you can use. So what are some ways we can address this? I'll recommend you a tool that you can use to find other Spanish speakers to practice with. But before that, there's one thing that you can do anytime and anywhere. Talk to yourself. When you hear a cool phrase like, en casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo, when you hear a cool phrase like that, take it and say it back to yourself over and over again. If you find a cool chance to say it throughout the day, a situation that fits in, or just for the sake of it, say the phrase. You don't need anyone else around you. And if you're too nervous to say it out loud, use your mind. Think the phrase over and over again. So take the words and phrases that you like from all these sources we talked about. TV, news sources, music. Find the phrases that you really like and repeat them to yourself over and over again. The more repetition you give to them, the more likely you are to remember them. I would usually end up going to bed repeating some phrase that I'd heard throughout the day, and that was actually how I ended up dreaming in Spanish for the first time. Now, for finding other speakers, you can use a platform like Tandem. It's essentially a platform that allows you to list languages that you know and languages that you're interested in learning, and it connects you to speakers who know the language you're trying to learn and are interested in the language that you know. I met a few friends on Tandem. We continue to have conversations to this day. So that's been an awesome tool for you to have, and maybe you can consider as an option. So there you have it. Five tips you can use this year in 2021 to really lock down in your Spanish, that you can look back in 2022 and see how far you've come, and be really proud of the progress that you've made. Maybe even plan a trip abroad when that's possible again. Now, if you've enjoyed this video, don't forget to like and subscribe, as I'll be releasing more content related to language learning each week, fingers crossed, and continuing the journey with you. So, what's your favorite method to learn Spanish? Do you already use some of the tips we talked about today? Share a comment, and we can turn this into a learning space where we can learn from each other, see what works, see what doesn't work, find out what other people are doing, and pick up new tricks for ourselves. I also welcome video suggestions, if there's any other topics that you'd like me to talk about, or explore further. That's all for now. Sending good vibes and energy your way, and hasta la próxima.