Patterns： A Faster Way to Learn Spanish

If you're not familiar with my backstory, I learned Spanish on my own, as an adult, just out of necessity. I was working as a deputy sheriff in a rural Florida county with tens of thousands of migrant farm workers, most of whom were from Mexico and only spoke Spanish. So I went from only knowing a handful of phrases that I got out of high school Spanish, which I was really, really bad at, barely got by with a D, but it wasn't really useful for what I needed, but that's all I had. But within two years, I was translating on complex criminal investigations. That's quite a jump, right? Also, my translations were standing up to the scrutiny of defense attorneys and judges. Really proud about that. Over my 25 year law enforcement career, I translated thousands of times and even did undercover operations entirely in Spanish. You know, over the years, people have asked me what the secret is to learning Spanish as an adult and learning it quickly, and it's simple. Patterns. Learn the patterns of the language and you will be able to say whatever you want. You know, language is really broken down into two key components, and I'm talking about when you're learning it as an adult. The things you say to someone and what they say to you. Now, the first one is the one that you can develop quickly using patterns. The second one, what they say to you, that one's going to take longer. That's where your listening comprehension comes into play. And well, that just takes time to develop. But the good news is you will be speaking Spanish long before you develop that ear for the language. If you follow the pattern approach. So let's talk about that. That first thing, the pattern approach and controlling what you say. I'm going to show you what I mean, because right now you're like, I think you're full of crap, Paul. I'm going to assume that you have never learned Spanish in your life, at least for this segment. All right. So view this segment from that perspective. I'm going to start with a vocabulary pattern. English and Spanish share similar root languages, Latin and Greek. And as a result, thousands of words are very similar or even the same between the two languages. Now, by learning language patterns, you can logically come up with these words. You don't have to memorize them one at a time. It's patterns, folks. And if you follow these patterns, you're going to be correct the majority of the time using your logic, guessing, making an educated guess at what the word is. I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to call this one the T-I-O-N C-I-O-N cognate trick. This is how it works. The majority of words that end in T-I-O-N in English can be converted into Spanish. Let's take some T-I-O-N words in English. Confrontation, administration, observation. To change these into Spanish, we're going to take that last T in the word and change it to a C. Then we're going to put an accent over the O, and that's going to tell us where to put the emphasis. And ta-da. They're Spanish words now, right? That's it. They really are. So let's hear what those words sound like. Confrontación, administración, observación. Now, you probably didn't recognize them when you heard them, although they seem obvious now. But when you heard them, you probably didn't recognize them, and that's just because the pronunciation's different in Spanish. And it really comes down to learning the vowels. Good news there is the vowels have very simple sounds. There's five vowel sounds in Spanish. English has anywhere between 12 and 15, depending how they're counting. Spanish is very simplified. So when you learn those vowels, it's going to help you. So A is going to sound like A, and E is going to sound like E, and I is going to sound like I, and O is going to sound like O, and U will sound like U. Confrontación, administración, observación. You'll get the pronunciation with more practice. Don't worry. Just focus on the pattern for now. And now that I've taught you the pattern, it's your turn to use the pattern. Notification, identification, verification. Let's make these into Spanish. I'll give you a moment. Did you do it? Wasn't too hard, right? We changed the T to C. We put an accent over the O. Notificación, identificación, verificación. Now, there are a few additional things that you have to learn to use that pattern with all the different words. There's little tweaks here and there. One example is if there's a TH in the English word, that's just going to change to a T on the Spanish side. I'll give you an example. Here you go. Authorization. That TH will become a T. The rest of it is going to be just like I taught you. You want to try that one? Go ahead and try that one. I think you got it. It's all about patterns. Ready? Autorización. Autorización. Do you get that? It's not that tough. Pronunciation is going to be the toughest, but not learning the pattern. Look how fast you learn this pattern. This pattern is going to give you hundreds of words, but how useful are these words? These are nouns, right? I mean, they're cool. We talk about notifications and identifications and verifications, all neat stuff, but we need verbs, right? We like verbs. We need some action words. Well, got a pattern for that too, folks. We're going to take our pattern to the next stage and make verbs out of these. This is how it works. If the noun we created using our T-I-O-N, C-I-O-N cognate trick, ends in acción, then we can make it a verb. All we have to do is drop the C-I-O-N and put an R. So, confrontación becomes confrontar, which means to confront. That's your verb. And administración becomes administrar, which means to manage, to run, to govern something. And observación becomes, it's a pattern, folks. I'm sure you can already see it, observar, observar, to observe. You want to try some other ones? You had some other words you were playing with. I think you can do these. All right. You remember these? Notificación, identificación, verificación. You can see them on the screen. Tournament of verbs. To notify is notificar. To identify is identificar. To verify is verificar. Magic? No. Patterns, folks. Patterns. And that is a language pattern, and just one of them. Let's go ahead and talk about a grammar pattern, because we want to be able to use these words. And right now, they're not conjugated. They're just in the infinitive, the unconjugated form. To notify, to identify, to observe. We're going to have to do something with them. So, I'm going to teach you another pattern so you can actually make sentences or portions of sentences, phrases that you can pop together. And here's the pattern in Spanish. When we have a series of verbs together, we're only conjugating the first one in the series. So, my first verb is conjugated. And after that, I can take infinitives, like I just showed you, and just drop them in. I like to think of that first verb as like the locomotive on a train, and all the rest of these unconjugated verbs. Infinitives are just cars that it's pulling along. So, what we want to do to have something useful is we need to have a conjugated verb that we're going to say a lot, so it'll make sense, so we don't have to think about it. And we talk about we want to do a lot. So, let's just start there. We're going to start with I want. So, we can say things like I want to do something. I want to identify, verify, use all of these cool verbs, right? I want to do that. But I have to conjugate I want. Yo quiero. Yo quiero. Now, in Spanish, it is common to drop the yo, and they can just say quiero, like quiero, quiero. You can just say that, and it means I want. So, we're going to have a little formula now. We're going to have quiero plus infinitive. We're going to break Spanish down into formulas, to patterns, because they're easier to remember. And this means I want to do something, whatever you plug in there. So, let's take a sentence. I want to verify the information. That's a complete sentence. And we just started learning Spanish like, I don't know, 10 minutes ago, something like that. I haven't checked my time. I want to verify the information. Let's break it down. I want. This is where you speak. Quiero. You learned that one. To verify. Do you know to verify? Think. Verification. Do I have a T-I-O-N word? Yeah. How do I change that? Verificación. Can I change that into a verb? Yes, if it ends with acción. Verificar. So, I have quiero verificar. I want to verify. The. Hmm. Haven't learned the yet. I'm going to come back to that. All right. Let's go to that last word. Information. Can we translate information using our patterns? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we can. Información. Información. So, we have I want to verify blank information. Now, I'm going to tell you that all of these T-I-O-N words that we make are going to be feminine. You see, in Spanish, all of the nouns are either masculine or feminine, and the word for the is different. So, if it's masculine, it's el, and if it's feminine, it's la. These are all feminine. So, the, if it's a singular noun, will be la. So, just plug in la. What do we get? This is where you say it. Quiero verificar la información. That's a sentence, folks. You made a sentence out of patterns. What if I want to tweak that a little bit? I want to confirm the information. Go ahead and do that one for me. I'm already guessing you've spit it out already. I'm just guessing because you already recognize the pattern. Quiero confirmar la información. That's how this works. You'll be able to use this pattern to say all kinds of things, and it doesn't have to be like this cognate trick. You can choose what you want to say. Like, let's say I want to talk about, I want to eat. I'm just going to go look up to eat, and I'm going to plug it into my sentence because I already know that this is my formula. Quiero verb. So, when I look up a verb, I want to eat, comer. Quiero comer. I want to eat, and it doesn't just work with this. I'm going to give you another cool little pattern, and these little patterns, I mean, we were just doing sentences, but don't think of them all as just sentences. Think of them as phrases, and you're going to be popping them together to say whatever it is you want to say. So, here's another pattern. If I want to say, before doing something, this is how I'm going to do it. Antes de plus infinitive. What's the infinitive? Exactly what we were talking about how to make using our TION trick, right? So, if I want to say, before confirming the information, because I want to begin my sentence that way, and this is my formula. Can you do it? Don't overthink it. I know you're looking at that English, and it's ending with an ING, and you're like, confirming. That sounds like I'm conjugating, Paul. Not on the Spanish side, buddy. Not on the Spanish side. Antes de confirmar la información. That's it. Before confirming the information. What a great way to start your sentences. It gives you time to think in a real conversation. You're like, antes de confirmar la información. Quiero verificar. I want to verify, and you're just plugging these things together. Now, I've only taught you a few patterns, so you don't have a lot to work with yet, but this is how it works, okay? Let's do another one. Do another one, okay? Before preparing the information, and we haven't even talked about preparing, but I think you can get it. Think about your patterns. I'll give you a little second here. I'm usually drinking coffee in these things, but I'm trying to cut back, and so it's just water. It's disappointing. You got it? Antes de preparar la información. Antes de preparar. Where did preparar come from? You thought preparation, right? Okay. I changed the T to C, put an accent over the O. Preparación. Can I make that a verb? Does it end in acción? Yes. I dropped acción, put an R. Preparar. That's where it came from. Now, antes de plus infinitive is fantastic. There are tons of these things. Perhaps you want to say after something. Después de plus infinitive. After observing the situation. You want to try that one? You ready? Después de observar la situación. Did you get that? Observar, we talked about, it was one of the verbs we were playing with. That should have come a little, you know, a little easier. Situation might have slowed you down, but should it have? Ends in T-I-O-N. We just changed the T to C, put an accent over the O, became situación. And why is it la? Because they're all feminine nouns, and that's how you say the when it's singular. Patterns, folks. Patterns. So once you understand these little patterns, you can learn other vocabulary as needed. Depends what you want to talk about. Everybody's going to be a little bit different. So let's say you want to say, before eating, and you just had learned comer. You're going to plug it in and say what? Antes de comer. After eating. Después de comer. Now, if you watch any of my videos, you'll notice that I use a lot of grammatical terms, and sometimes that's a turnoff for people. But the reason I do it is because grammar is the blueprint of the language. And when I say blueprint, it means those are the patterns. Somebody's already figured out all the patterns, put them all together in a collection, and called it grammar. So if you're learning from another Spanish program, and they're like, oh, grammar is not important. Just listen long enough, and you're going to pick up on these things. That is a really slow way to learn a language. I've seen a lot of people try that, and I have not known many to be very successful. With this method, you're going to be able to speak intelligently very quickly. You're listening is going to be like, how do you get so good at Spanish so fast? I promise you. Now, once you're actually speaking to people, you can work on that second aspect of language. You remember that one I mentioned early on? We have what we're saying and what the other person is saying. Now, that one, that's the tough one. That is the listening comprehension one. That's the one that you can't do logically. You just have to keep exposing your ear to the language. Kind of like that method I just mentioned that some courses rely on 100%. I don't agree with that. It's a factor. You have to use it, but I think you have to couple it with patterns, with the grammar. Understand the language. Gets you talking. Once you're talking to people, you're exposing yourself to the language more anyway. So that listening comprehension is going to become easier. Also, you're learning vocabulary so much faster, you're going to start recognizing their words faster. And it doesn't really matter why you're learning Spanish, what purpose. If it's for business and let's say you're law enforcement, you're learning it for that, or you're a nursing, or if it's for travel or just for your own fun, it doesn't matter because the patterns are the same. The only thing that changes is the vocabulary we're plugging into the patterns. But that can be anything you want to talk about. Just like I showed you, after doing something, you choose what to plug in after that. So if this method of learning sounds good to you, you should subscribe to this channel because that's how I teach this language. And I have a ton of material on the channel. Now, if you want a more organized course and additional assistance to help you reach your language goals, you might want to join my learning group, the KIRU Spanish Crew. I have organized courses over there. I provide personalized assistance. We have monthly live events. There's just a lot going on over there. I'll put a link to it in the description section of this video and pin it to the top of the comments. Well, that's all I have. I'm getting a little parched here and I'm giving up on water. I'm going to go get some coffee anyway. If you did like the video, do me a favor and give it a thumbs up. And until next time, hasta luego.