Tips for English Speakers Learning Spanish

Hey everybody, Kiru Paul here. Have you been trying to learn Spanish for a while, but you're not seeing any real progress? Maybe you're on your 300th day on Duolingo, it says you should be like 70% fluent, but you can't talk to anybody. If I'm describing you, you might want to stick around for this video because I'm going to share a winning strategy with you to help you break through that plateau and achieve a level of fluency. Now I'm going to warn you right up front, this video is going to be longer than most of my videos because I'm going to go into a lot of detail here. Now if you like what I'm talking about, you like the methods that I'm describing, you might want to subscribe to the channel because this is exactly how I teach Spanish. And if you're looking for a more structured course and assistance, whether you're an absolute beginner, intermediate, trying to help get to that next level, you might want to consider joining my paid learning group, the Kiru Spanish Crew. You'll find a link to that in the description section and pasted at the top of the comments. Click the link, you'll learn more about it. All right, let's go ahead and kick this thing off. To reach your goal of being fluent as quickly as possible, I recommend you use a three-pronged approach. The first prong, and the most important in my opinion, is to focus on learning language patterns, breaking the Spanish language down into little patterns that you could pop together to come up with your own sentences. I'm going to be going into a lot of detail on how that works exactly. The second prong is to expose yourself as much as possible to the written and spoken language. Even if your goal is to only speak Spanish, focusing also on the written language is really going to help you get there faster. All right. And the third prong is to specifically practice for conversations in Spanish. Now, most people do not do this. This is why it's not uncommon to hear somebody say, hey, you know, I've been studying Spanish for years. I'm an intermediate level. I think I speak it well. But when the time comes to have an actual conversation, you know, I freeze up and I flounder. The reason for that is you have to train for conversations. And I'm going to be covering how to do that in this video. All right. Now it's time to get into the details of those three things I talked about. I'm going to start with that first prong, learning patterns in the Spanish language. Now, this isn't something you could just like basically do on your own. You're like, I'm just going to break the Spanish language down into small patterns so it's easier to remember and use. You have to find somebody who teaches that way and then learn. And that's exactly the way I teach. So I'm going to explain how the patterns approach works. Now, as an English speaker, you already have a huge advantage when it comes to learning Spanish. And there's lots of reasons for that. And I'm going to explain as we go through this. But one of the big ones is vocabulary. You see, the two languages share some common linguistic roots. And as a result, they share a lot of vocabulary. You just probably weren't aware of it. For example. Okay. I love examples. Take a look at the screen. Look at all these English words. Okay. There's a lot of them up there. A lot of them. Keep watching them. Don't blink. I'm going to change them all into Spanish. Ready? Don't blink. There they are. They're all Spanish. I know. It's a pretty cool trick, right? Now, chances are you did not recognize these words when you heard them in Spanish. And that's because the pronunciation is different, right? So like central would be central. Doesn't sound exactly the same. That's probably why you missed it. Animal. Animal. So you're like, all right, I gotta learn a new pronunciation. Yeah. But the good news is that Spanish pronunciation is not difficult to learn. Spanish is just such a great second language. Okay. For a lot of reasons. And this is another one. There's only five vowel sounds. A, E, I, O, and U. Each one only has one sound associated with it. That's it. English has around 15. Anywhere between 15 and 20. They say American English is like 14 or 15. And, you know, British English is around 20. I should look into that sometime. Anyway, there's a lot of them. In Spanish, there's just the five. A will always sound like ah. E will always sound like eh. I will always sound like ee. O will always sound like oh. And U will always sound like ooh. That's it. And this is going to make it very easy for you to actually pronounce Spanish just by seeing the word. You're going to know how to pronounce it. For example, if you see this word. Normal. Right? This is one of our little tricks here. In Spanish, it's the same word. But we know our vowels are only going to have two sounds, right? So we're like, okay. Normal. Normal. That's it. We know how to pronounce this word. We can't do that in English. Right? Take a look at this word. Boat. Why is it not boat? That doesn't make any sense. Oh, and these two words. Heard, like you heard something, and beard. If only the first letter is different, why do they have different pronunciations? You're never going to have that in Spanish. If you can see it, you can say it. Now, I know some folks watching are like, all right, what about that double r thing? That r sound, Paul. That's not going to be easy. Yeah. You might have some trouble rolling those r's, okay? Like in perro, you know? Carro. But if you can't master it, it's okay. In fact, you can always say you're learning Costa Rican pronunciation because they are not known for making the r sound. All right. Back to all those little words I showed you on the screen. There they are again. They all end in al, right? And they're the same in both languages. And not every al word is. Sometimes there's little spelling changes or some tweaks. But they follow set patterns. And you can learn what those tweaks are, those patterns as well. These are called cognates. Cognates are words between two languages. They might be the same. They might be similar. Now, there are a lot of different Spanish cognates. And some of them, I'm like, yeah, they're more useful than others. I mean, some of them, it's just like, that's an interesting footnote. But they're not giving you a ton of vocabulary. The main cognate trick that I teach is the T-I-O-N, C-I-O-N cognate trick. The majority of the words in English that end in T-I-O-N can be converted into Spanish. Here are a few to play with. Observation. Information. Confrontation. Creation. To make these Spanish, we simply change that last T to a C and then put an accent over the O. That accent is going to tell us to put the emphasis there when we pronounce the word. Now, of course, we have to pronounce it using those vowel sounds we talked about, right? So observation would become observación. Information would become información. Confrontation would become confrontación. And creation would become creación. And don't worry if you don't have your pronunciation right right now. It takes practice. So if you're saying stuff like observación, you'll get there. Okay, you're going to get there. The important thing here is you're seeing a pattern. And you can learn a pattern and repeat it because, well, you're an adult. You're using logic. You're using your English. I can show it to you and you can use your logic to create things, right? Why don't you try some? Okay, I'm that confident you can do it. Do these. We'll give you two. Participation and decoration. Those are good ones. A little bit of water. I usually drink coffee in these things, but it's a little later in the day. You got them? I gave you lots of time. Participation becomes participación. And decoration becomes decoración. Wasn't that hard, right? Now, some words will have little spelling changes in the root, but those also follow predictable patterns and you can learn them. In fact, I go into a lot of detail about this particular cognate trick early on in my Spanish master course. So if you take that, you're going to know all about this. You're going to be a wiz at this, all right? Now, this trick is super useful, but it doesn't work for every T-I-O-N word out there. For example, translation is not translación. It's actually traducción. And to translate it is traducir. Why? I don't know. But those cases are the exception. They're not the rule. And you can still make an educated guess at a word if you don't know it. And if you're wrong, like you said, translación, the person would be like, traducción? And you go, oh yeah, yeah, traducción. Noted. And that's how you learn the language, through trial and error, all right? So these cognates are cool, right? But they don't do us any good if they're just isolated words. We have to be able to make sentences. We just can't walk around and try to dazzle people with our ability to use cognates. Confrontation. Confrontación. That's pretty good. We need sentences. Well, to make a sentence, we're going to need some verbs, right? And I'm not trying to confuse you with all these grammatical terms. You should know verb. Those are action words. They have to be in a sense. Well, I'm going to show you an easy way to guess verbs using patterns. Remember that T-I-O-N-C-I-O-N trick we just covered? And I hope you do, because literally, we just covered it. Well, what if I told you that you can make all of those words, those nouns, into verbs? Pretty good trick, right? And it's just following more patterns. So this is how it works. When we use our T-I-O-N-C-I-O-N trick to make a noun, and that noun ends in acción, like A-C-I-O-N, as these all do, we can change the noun into a verb by dropping the acción and adding A-R. So now these are all verbs. Observar. To observe. Informar. To inform. Confrontar. To confront. Crear. To create. Participar. To participate. Decorar. To decorate. That wasn't that tough, right? I mean, you just learned a pattern. How long would it have taken you to just learn those as isolated words if you didn't recognize that pattern? You're like, okay, participate. Oh, I keep checking my list. No, you're doing out of your English. All right, now we want to make sentences. We've got verbs to play with. I will tell you that one of the most challenging aspects of learning Spanish is learning their conjugations. Their conjugations are more complex than English, okay? So you're going to have to work at that. So in order for us to be able to speak quickly, we try to find ways to get around conjugating, right? Until we get good at it, because we want to start talking today. Well, we're going to use language patterns to help with that, too. Now, when I teach someone who's a beginner the Spanish language, what I do is I use some plug-and-play phrases that they can drop verbs into so they don't have to try to think what the conjugation is. And when they first start out, we generally start with what they want to do, what the other person wants to do, you know, have a conversation, what they can do. You know, they can show ability or talk about permission and then obligation, what they have to do. That's generally how we start. So we're going to go ahead and play with that a little bit. We're just going to do what I want to do and what I can do. We'll just play with that. And you'll see how you'll be able to use these patterns and make sentences you may never have seen or heard before in Spanish, but they will be correct, all right? So we need to learn how to say I want. So I want is yo quiero. And in Spanish, we can drop that yo, that's the I part, and just say quiero, quiero. Now, a Q-U sounds like a K sound. And then I has a hard E, and then E has an A, so it's quiero, quiero. Practice that. Oh, I take a drink. So I love reducing the Spanish language down into a series of little patterns or formulas. Here's our formula for this. Quiero plus the infinitive. The infinitive is the unconjugated verb. And that's what we just had. We got a whole bunch of them. We're just going to drop them in. That's it. So it'll be I want to do something. Well, now that you've seen the formula, go ahead and try to translate this. I want to participate. And feel free to take your time. It shouldn't take too long because we already worked out that verb. Are you ready? Quiero participar. That's it. Quiero participar. All we did was take our verb in the infinitive and just drop it into the formula. Let's do another one real quick. I want to decorate. It's also a verb we recently discussed. You ready? Quiero decorar. Quiero decorar. It's just about, you know, getting that pronunciation, but you're going to get it. Look, you're already making sentences, right? It's all about breaking the language down into little patterns and formulas that we string together to make sentences. The more patterns you learn, the more things you can say, the more complex your sentences can become. Now let's go ahead and do one that doesn't use a verb that we've already worked out. Okay, so you're going to have to do a little bit of mental gymnastics with this one. Let's do the verb to verify. I want to verify the information. Look, that's a longer sentence. Now, just based on the patterns that I've already taught you, you should be able to translate everything except for the word the. Now, if you've been learning Spanish for a while, you probably know the, but if you're an absolute beginner, you don't. So just based on what I talked to you about, at least give me the rest. All right. Now you're doing a little mental gymnastics, right? If you need more time, go ahead and hit pause. Otherwise I'm going to move on. You should have, quiero verificar. We won't do the yet. Informacion. Do you have that? Did you get verificar? How did we get that? Well, we saw to verify and we thought of a T-I-O-N word, you know, related to verify. Verification. And hopefully you didn't skip to right to doing the verb because sometimes that'll throw you off with some of these. So you're like, all right, verification, change the T to a C, put an accent on the O. That tells us to put the emphasis there. And it's Spanish. Verificación. If it ends in acción, we know we can make it a verb. So we drop acción and put A-R. Verificar. That's where we got it. And, you know, información, we already did that one before. That one was a piece of cake, right? Piece of cake. So now let's look at that word, the, there. Every noun in Spanish has a gender assigned. It's either masculine or feminine. And the word the will change based if it's masculine or feminine. And in the case of objects, and even objects have gender, like chair or desk or camera, it's going to seem very random if they're masculine or feminine. In fact, back in the day, I was like, why is book masculine and house feminine? There's no logic to that. It just is. So let's look at those two words as an example. Okay. Book is masculine. Libro. And house is feminine. Casa. You see one ends with an O, one ends with an A. That is a good indication if something's masculine or feminine, but it's not perfect sometimes. You know, it's not accurate. You'll learn more about that in my course. All right. The important thing here, let's get to the. As I said, the word the changes based on the gender and also the number. There's a plural. So for masculine, the for singular will be el and los for plural. El libro, the book. Los libros, the books. For a feminine noun, it's going to be la and las. La casa, the house. Las casas, the houses. All right. So hopefully I haven't lost you with all that. Okay. Especially if you're an absolute beginner. Back to our CION words. Okay. What are they? They don't end with an O or an A. Well, you're in luck. They're all feminine. All of them. So you never have to wonder, is that one el or is that one la? All of them are feminine. So if I want to say, you know, the information, it would be la información. The verification, la verificación. The administration, la administración. All right. So there's your word to finish this. Let's get back. How do you do it? Put it all together. I want to verify the information. You should have been saying that out loud. Quiero verificar la información. Oh, and I would just like to point out that you are making sentences in Spanish using logic, your knowledge of English and patterns. Speaking of patterns, let's go ahead and add one. Let's add I can't. And this is going to be yo puedo. And it could be pronounced also yo or yo, that first one. But we know we can leave that off, right? We can drop that subject and just say puedo, puedo. And you might have to practice that word. It's kind of like a PW, kind of a puedo, puedo. So our formula is puedo plus infinitive. And this means I can do something, right? This is how we're going to express our ability to do something or ask for permission. So this is especially useful as a question, to ask for permission. So if I want to say I can verify the information, how would I do that? It's all about patterns, right? Swapping out things. Do that. I can verify the information. Puedo verificar la información. Did you get that? But what if I want to make it a question? What if I want to ask, can I verify the information? How do I do that? Well, it's super simple. If we're writing this, all we're going to do is put an upside down question mark at the sentence, a regular one at the end. And when we're speaking it, we're going to change our inflection to make it sound like a question. Puedo verificar la información. That's it. That's how easy it was to make it a question. Now, not everything we want to talk about is going to be a cognate, right? I mean, it would be nice if it was, but you're going to have to learn some individual words and just plug them in. But that's okay, because that's all you're doing. So once you have these patterns, you're going to learn other vocabulary that's relevant to whatever you want to talk about, and you could just plug it in. For example, to eat in Spanish is comer, comer. So we can just plug it into things we've already learned. How would I, how would I say, I want to eat? Quiero comer. How would I say, can I eat? Puedo comer, right? We say it like a question. Puedo comer? Can I eat? Yes, I can eat. Sí, puedo comer. And I didn't even teach you yes yet, but you probably already knew that, right? So patterns are pretty cool, right? They make it easier to learn Spanish, and patterns exist throughout the entire Spanish language. It's like a very logical language that somebody sat down and created. So it makes patterns really easy to learn. Now, when you're learning a pattern, it's not something that just stays by itself. As you learn other patterns, you can pop them together to make more complex sentences and use them together. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean. Here's another cool pattern. To say before doing something, okay, this is our formula for that. Antes de, plus infinitive. It's a formula. So I want you to translate this because you've seen the formula. Before eating, translate that. Antes de comer. Did you get that? Or did you pause a moment and you're like, okay, the English changed to eating with an ing, right? Does the Spanish have to change? No. Trust the formulas. It says just drop in the infinitive. That is all you're doing. All right. Now that you've seen this one, go ahead and translate before participating, and let's mix it with our other pattern. I want to eat. Oh, I got two patterns here. Take your time. You ready? Antes de participar, quiero comer. There you have it. Entire sentence, two different patterns. What about this one? Translate this one. Can I eat before participating? So we have, can I, and I'm going to give you that one because I haven't shown it to you too much, and that is, puedo. Puedo. And you should be able to get the rest. Can I eat before participating? It's a little bit different in the word order, but the patterns don't change. Just the order, you know, that we put them in, and we're just plugging in our verbs. You got it? Puedo comer antes de participar? That's it. You just made an entire sentence. Possibly, in fact, probably a sentence you've never seen or heard before in Spanish, but it's correct because you can trust these patterns. Okay. Now, not everything in the Spanish language is going to be as simple to learn as what I've shown you here today, but even those more challenging aspects of the language, they can be made easier using patterns and little formulas, breaking them down that way. That way, you know, even though they're difficult, you're like, all right, as long as I follow this little pattern and formula, I can create sentences, again, that I may never have seen or heard, but they're going to be correct. Now, if you like this method of teaching, this patterns and formula approach, that's how I teach the language. In fact, if you're new to Spanish, I encourage you to take the Spanish Master Course. You'll find the first several lessons of the Spanish Master Course for free on my main YouTube channel. You know, check it out. See if it's for you. If you want to take the whole course, come over to the Kiroo Spanish Crew. That's my paid group. I have a ton of stuff in the Kiroo Spanish Crew. I have lessons for intermediate and advanced folks, a ton of other lessons and exercises to help you with listening comprehension. There are live events. You can ask me questions directly. Just have a lot going on in there. If you're serious about your Spanish, love to see you over there. All right, so let's go ahead and move on to the second prong in our strategy. This one's not going to be as long. It's pretty self-explanatory. You need to expose yourself as much as possible to both the spoken and written language. Nowadays, this is so easy to do. You're not going to have any trouble finding material. You can find tons of stuff on YouTube. Read Spanish language websites all day. You just need to make a commitment to actually do it every single day. Now, I can't overstate the importance of reading in Spanish. Even if you only just want to, you know, speak Spanish, reading it is going to help you learn the patterns a lot faster. It's going to help you gain vocabulary and progress quickly. It's one of the reasons that I was able to become fluent so quickly. And it wasn't just, you know, my interactions with people at work. It's because I would go and actually read every single night out of a novel, and I picked up so much about the Spanish language doing that. And I'm saying a novel, even being early on. So when I tell people, hey, you need to read, they'll be like, okay, I'm going to get some basic kids books and cat in the hat stuff. No, you need to be reading regular reading material. Your goal is to reach, you know, an intermediate level, a conversational level, and you're not going to do that with cat in the hat. All right. Now, if you're a beginner, you're probably like, well, Paul, I don't speak Spanish, so I really can't read it at an intermediate level. It's not reading like you do in English where you're just, you know, casually reading your novel. And you're like, that was interesting. No, it doesn't work that way. These are study sessions. You're going to go line by line, word by word. And if you're a beginner, it's going to be a very slow process because you're looking up so many words. Well, after a while, you're not looking up that word anymore. You know that word. And then you start to see, you know, the same patterns and stuff being used throughout the story. So when it was a novel and I started, it was just very laborious. I would go through looking up words. I may only go through like a paragraph before bed, and I'd add a bunch of stuff to my word list. Oh, I like this particular phrase, or I kind of like the way this was, you know, the sentence was structured. So it might take a little bit of that, but it took forever. Well, by the second or third chapter, I'm going much faster. I'm going paragraphs at a time in the same amount of time. And my vocabulary is just building so much faster than it would if I just had a list of words. You know, if I just got a random list of vocabulary to learn, I'd be like, okay, start going through it. I may not find it all interesting, but when I was, you know, doing it with a novel, it was all vocabulary that I found interesting were all constructions that I found interesting. So what do I mean by found interesting? It could be a phrase or, you know, a construction. Let's say a phrase. I remember when I was reading a novel and I came across the phrase, deja mucho que desear. He leaves a lot to be desired. And I was like, I like that one. And it made my list and I still haven't forgotten it. I work it into conversations every now and then. All right, let's go ahead and move on to the third prong in the strategy. And that is to train specifically for conversations. And this is something that most people don't do. And when I say training for conversations, it means learning some basic strategies that will make it easier to have a conversation in Spanish. And then practicing those skills, practicing conversations every single day. Let's start with the basic strategies. Okay. Number one on the list, and people do this wrong all the time, do not translate entire sentences in your head into Spanish before speaking. Don't do that. I know you're doing it. Everybody does it. Don't do it. You're not going to be able to keep up with the conversation. You'll have awkward lulls. You know, they'll say something to you and you'll go, as you try to formulate this whole sentence and then start to spit it out. You don't do that in English. You start talking and you're kind of building your sentence. And if you make a mistake in English, you kind of go up and you just readjust. You need to do the same thing in Spanish. Conversations are very time sensitive. So you need to start to reply with something. And it can be a great sentence starter. And that's actually my second tip is to learn a bunch of great sentence starters in Spanish. So you can throw them out and then start to build your sentence behind it. That first word, that sentence starter is like the locomotive. And as it's leaving, the other person knows you're talking. You're adding the rest of your little patterns or plug and play phrases, et cetera, and building your sentence. So what do I mean by a sentence starter? Well, there's short ones like, bueno. That'd be like going, well, okay. And then you get, you know, start to add stuff. And then there's ones that are a bit longer, like, creo que. I think that, or I believe that. And, you know, you can use two together. You can be like, bueno, creo que. And see, you have more time to think of the whole sentence. And some of your sentence starters might be really long, you know, when you really want to have some time to think. And you might have something like, en cuanto a lo que dijiste, in reference to what you said. And then you put it behind everything else. So you're like, huh, I need some time on this. Bueno, en cuanto a lo que dijiste, creo que. And then you, by then you've got some kind of response to start sticking on there. Another thing I encourage people to do is, after having a conversation with someone, is to do a little self-assessment. And if you're like me, and you're hard on yourself, you're already doing this anyway. You'll be like, oh, I didn't say that right. Oh, I should have phrased it this way. A little self-assessment is going to help you identify those gaps in your vocabulary, so then you can go fill them. You're like, I said everything right up to this point. I didn't know this word. Let me go look it up. So those are some basic recommendations to help you have better conversations and keep it flowing. Let's talk about that requirement or that recommendation to practice conversations every single day. That's one that folks tell me, I can't do that, Paul. I'm not in a position to speak to Spanish speakers every single day. Everybody is now. Everybody is now because of AI tutors. In fact, I encourage every one of my students to use an AI tutor for this purpose, to practice conversations. Now, if you start to look for AI language tutors, you're going to find there are a ton of them out there. It is a very saturated market. I recently spent a couple months just testing multiple ones, downloading and signing up. And I'll tell you what, they are not all created equal. The best one I've found to date is Lengua. I think it's fantastic for a lot of reasons. I've done a few videos on them if you want to watch that later. If you do decide to try Lengua, I do have an affiliate link for them in the description section of the video. It just helps me out if you go through my link and sign up at their website before downloading their app. I also have a discount code if you want to sign up for one of Lengua's annual plans, and that is QRUALLCAPS. You'll save 20% on their annual plans. Well, I warned you early on that this video was going to be longer than most of them. I don't know who's still here at the end. If you are, don't forget to give it a thumbs up if you enjoyed it. And if you still are here at the end, I'm assuming you enjoyed it. I probably should have done the thumbs up request earlier on. I'll get better at this YouTube thing one day. Well, thank you very much for watching and until next time, hasta luego.