How To Learn Spanish FAST When You Don’t Have Time

In this video, I'm going to show you how to learn Spanish, even when you don't have much time. And I'm going to do this with a few simple cheat codes that make the learning happen faster straight away. But after 25 years of learning and teaching languages, writing a bunch of books about learning Spanish, I figured out that Spanish, well, the language really is rigged in your favor. You've just got to know where the clever shortcuts are hiding. So in this video, I'm going to show you seven Spanish cheat codes that are going to make it feel easier almost straight away. You'll see what's worth your time, what you can safely skip and how to start speaking Spanish, even if you only got a few minutes a day. Now, first up, a cheat so obvious you'll kick yourself. And it's almost embarrassing because if you speak English, you already know far more Spanish than you would ever believe. And yet almost every beginner walks straight past it. Why? Because when you start speaking Spanish, you can't help but fixate on all the scary looking bits, the upside down question marks, the squiggly ends, the rolled R, the way native speakers go on at such blazing speed. You can't catch a thing they say. Yeah, it feels very different from English, I know. And you just think, damn, Spanish is hard. So try something with me for a second. Read along with me. Did you understand any of that? I bet you did. Which means, congratulations, you have just read some Spanish. Also, terrible hotel one star review from me. Now, this isn't random luck. English and Spanish overlap far more than people think. They share huge amounts of vocabulary, which is what we call cognates. And Spanish is kind enough to label these for you because the endings of words follow patterns, reliable patterns, which means you can literally convert English into Spanish. Watch this. Take any English word ending in T-I-O-N, so ambition, sensation, revolution. Now swap that ending for C-I-O-N in Spanish, ambición, sensación, revolución. That's Spanish. Now, what about T-Y words like curiosity, reality? Well, these endings become dad in Spanish, curiosidad, realidad. And the L-Y words, how you do something, these adverbs, perfectly, drastically, you just add mentes, perfectamente, drasticamente. See what just happened here? You didn't learn three words. You learned three patterns. And each pattern is worth hundreds, sometimes thousands of words. And that's a frankly ridiculous amount of Spanish that you've just unlocked without memorizing a thing. Learn the patterns, spell out an English word, swap the ending, and nine times out of 10, you'll be right. It won't always be perfect. The odd one will trip you up. There are exceptions. But as far as cheat codes go, for a busy beginner, this is the closest thing to free Spanish you will ever get. And instead of slogging through random word lists, you'll be reverse engineering Spanish from words that you've known your whole life. This whole idea that you can understand things without forcing it is at the heart of how I teach languages at Story Learning. I teach languages through stories, and the stories that I write are chock full of these familiar words early on, on purpose. So you see them and learn a lot of words very easily from the very first page. And to give you a taste of exactly what that feels like, I've put together a free short story in Spanish for you called La Ultima Aventura. And it comes with audio as well, so you can read and listen along. I actually walk you through how to use it step by step, so you'll very quickly get the hang of it. You can grab this for free by scanning the QR code on the screen, or there is a link in the description. So now you've got a ton of useful Spanish words. And then someone comes along and decides to ruin your day with another word, conjugations. Yep, good old verb conjugations, everyone's favorite thing in Spanish. And that's when you have to change the ending of the verb. Now, listen, I get it. English verbs are very lazy in comparison, right? I speak, you speak, we speak. It's not exactly rocket science, is it? You just add an S for the third person, so she speaks. That's as much as our verbs change. That's it. You're done. Mentally, at least. That's about it. Then you look at Spanish, and one single verb looks like hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablais, hablan. That's six forms just to say speak. Remember tenses? Tenses are when things happen, right? Past, present, or future. So do I speak now, tomorrow, or in the past? Well, you take these six forms that we just looked at and multiply that by 18 tenses. Yeah. Tea, anybody? But wait, before you quit, let's pull the emergency brake, because that massive maths problem is a trap that you don't need to walk into. You don't need hundreds of verbs at the start. You don't need giant conjugation tables. They're there if you go looking for them, but you don't need them. Instead, you just need four incredibly useful starter phrases that let you bolt an action onto the end. Quiero, puedo, tengo que, hay que. This is want, can, have to, and must. Think of them like four little engines. You start with the one you need, and you simply add the action you want on the end of it. No conjugating required, and you'll be able to say thousands of things. Let me show you how it works. If you want something, your engine is quiero. Quiero hablar con el director. I want to speak to the manager. If it's possible to do something, use puedo. Puedo ayudar. I can help. If you have to do something, it's tengo que. Tengo que salir de aquí. I have to get out of here. If something simply needs to happen, your engine is hay que. Hay que capturar el cocodrilo. That crocodile from earlier, remember? Now here's the beautiful part. Look at those second words. Hablar, ayudar, salir, capturar. Speak, help, leave, catch. They're all sitting there in their simple dictionary form. There are no conjugations there. Remember all those scary verb conjugation table? Not there. And as long as you start with your engines, the quiero, puedo, you don't have to conjugate the action word at all. It comes in the infinitive form. Nice, huh? So if you want to say, I want to learn Spanish, you say, quiero aprender español. I have to work tomorrow. Tengo que trabajar mañana. You just get the starter phrase and then you stick the action on the end and suddenly you can talk about anything that you want or need. Now, obviously this just gets you started, but it's a huge chunk of everyday conversation. But having the right words in your head is only half the battle. The moment you try to say Spanish out loud, a whole new problem kicks in, which is that you don't sound anything like the people that you're listening to. Your mouth just feels clumsy. You know that feeling? But that's not really because Spanish is difficult. It's because you spent your whole life speaking English. Spanish uses different sounds, different rhythms, different stress patterns. So when you try speaking, your mouth is basically doing it for the first time. The vowels go lazy like we do in English and word stress lands all over the place like we do in English. In the United States, everyone has a giant truck. Those that almost occupy two guerrillas. The last time I bought a car here, it was so small that I could barely fit in. Listen, nobody expects flawless, but it should at least sound vaguely Spanish, I think. And it's almost always the vowels that get you. See, Spanish only has five vowel sounds, a, e, i, o, u, and they never, ever, ever change. Unlike English, which has more like 20. I was told that in English, there's like six vowels. No, you have like 58. Yeah, and the big giveaway is that we slip our lazy English vowels in without noticing, and that's the problem. But here is the fix, music. Because music goes straight at both of those things, vowels and rhythm. When you sing a word, it's really hard to mumble a vowel while you're holding it across a note. It forces your vowels out clean. It forces you to pay attention to them. And the beat falls right on the part that you stress, so you get it without trying. It'll be literally impossible for you to say corazon, meaning heart. You'll have to say corazon, because that's the way that it sounds in the song, and it's blindingly obvious because it's in the song. And of course, you'll be hearing these corazon sounds over and over, which is exactly the kind of exposure that you need. Hearing the sounds, saying them again and again. A song is the one thing you'll happily play 40, 50, 100 times over. You're not gonna do that with a grammar drill, are you? A song that you love, you will. It's on repeat without you even thinking. So the sounds sink in, and it never feels like practice. Repetition, that doesn't feel like repetition. I've learned entire languages through songs in the past. It's one of my favorite ways of learning a language, because you really get the sound in your head from the beginning. ♪ Y aunque el olvido que todo lo destruye ♪ ♪ Allá batado mi vieja ilusión ♪ Now, I don't mean sticking on Spotify while half answering emails and expecting fluency to descend from the heavens. It doesn't work like that. Just pick a song, listen to it a bunch of times, and then focus on a single line that you like and start singing it back exactly the way that you hear it. You get addicted in that way. When I learned Portuguese, I literally had these CDs of Bossa Nova, and I just used to play it, sit in my bedroom playing them over and over again with a guitar, just trying to figure it out. I must've sung some of these songs thousands of times. I found the music I liked, and the rest was easy. With Spanish, you are spoiled for choice. Latin America alone gives you salsa, bachata, reggaeton, which I don't really love, but some people do. A lot of people do, actually. Whatever it is you're into, it is there. So do that with a few songs that you love and watch your accent improve fast. Now, you are sounding a lot more natural. Good, that's great. But there's still one thing that instantly gives beginners away. You speak in lots of short, choppy sentences. I'm tired. It's late. I don't want to. All perfectly correct, but also rather robotic. And native speakers don't talk like that any more than you or I talk like that in English. They string their thoughts together with little linking phrases like, it's late, so I don't want to. That little so is the glue that ties two whole thoughts together, like a bridge. And just a handful of these can do a ridiculous amount of heavy lifting. You'll be able to talk about consequences, confirm things, explain something, reveal things. And the beautiful part, in Spanish, these are all just fixed little chunks. The phrases never change. There's no conjugating, no grammar headache. You just learn them, stick them on the front or the end of a sentence, and everything starts flowing a lot more naturally. Here are the four that I would use and learn straight away. Así que, this means so. As in, this happened, so now this. Perdí el bus, así que camino. I missed the bus, so I'm gonna walk. Es tarde, así que me voy. It's late, so I'm leaving. And then, de hecho, which means actually, or in fact, I love this one. Like, when you want to confirm something. Me gusta el café. De hecho, tomo tres al día. I like coffee. In fact, I drink three a day. And my other favorite one for you is, es que. Now, this one is absolute gold because you can use it to explain pretty much anything. It means, the thing is, or ah, it's just that. So if you're running late, es que había tráfico. The thing is that there was traffic. Trying to explain why you're refusing to swim, es que hay un cocodrilo. The thing is, there's a crocodile in the pool. It's that hotel, you know, the one that we gave one star. Es que, super useful. You can actually take this one a step further if you add la verdad in front. Now, la verdad means the truth. And so, you know how in English you say, well, the truth is that, the truth is, we say this a lot, right? Same in Spanish. La verdad es que. The truth is that. And anytime you want to reveal something, just whip that one out. So, la verdad es que, este hotel es terrible. The truth is, this hotel is awful. Can you see what's happening here? Four tiny phrases and all these jittery beginner sentences start sounding like smooth, connected thoughts. And believe me, this goes a long way in helping you sound fluent. Plus, there's even a sneaky bonus to this. While your mouth is busy saying, es que, or de hecho, your brain gets a couple of precious seconds to work out what's coming next. So, these little bridges don't just make you sound more natural, they buy you thinking time. Learn these four and even a few more, if you want, and you'll sound well above your actual level, which, let's be honest, is the entire point of a cheat code. But what happens when you actually need to ask somebody for something? Well, here's the situation. You're out and about and you want to do something like enter a place, sit down, take a photo, but you're not sure you're allowed. In English, you'd probably use a whole sentence like, do you mind if I take photos? Am I allowed to? Is this private? Can I go inside? Now, how are you supposed to work that out in Spanish? Your brain just freezes because you're scrambling for a can I, may I, could I, would I, and then stressing over it should be formal or informal. Tell you what, forget all of that. In Spanish, you just need two words. Se puede. Word for word, it's like, is it possible? Is it allowed? Se puede. But really, it's just a magic little pass that lets you do almost anything politely. Extremely versatile little phrase, and it works in pretty much every Spanish speaking country out there. So you walk into a cafe, you spot a free table, you catch the waiter's eye, point at it and goes, se puede, and boom, he knows exactly what you mean. Can I sit here? Or you want to try on some shoes in a store. Se puede, may I try? This is the cleanest, laziest way to be incredibly polite without ever opening a grammar book. But what about the future tense? Because sooner or later, you want to talk about your plans. Where are you going for dinner tonight? What are you doing tomorrow? Holiday plans. I'll be taking a trip down South. Trust me, a lot of students get stressed here because textbooks give you a bunch of different rules for the future tense, which usually leads to total brain panic. You try to say, we're going to eat. So we're going to eat in the restaurant tonight, but you overthink the grammar and we are going to eat. Outcomes, nosotros vamos a comeremos, which is basically, we are going to, we will eat. Yeah, not so good. Forget the textbook future tenses. I've got a nice little loophole for you. Just use the going to do something formula instead. It works exactly like English. You just say, voy a. I'm going to, and plug a regular action on the end, like run, sleep, fly, travel. Look how effortless this is. Voy a comer. Voy a estudiar. Voy a trabajar. Voy a viajar. I'm going to travel. Voy a volar. I'm going to fly. Want to see the true power of this hack? Combine it with cognates, words that are almost identical in English, like those pattern words from earlier, and you can instantly build amazing sentences with very little effort. Voy a explorar el área. I'm going to explore the area. Or maybe, voy a ignorar el cocodrilo. I'm going to ignore that crocodile. It's a massive cheat code because now you can talk about any future plans without using any conjugations whatsoever. But there's one more thing that you are still worried about. I know, I know exactly what it is, so I'm going to give you a cheat that is not a grammar hack. It is a mental cheat code to kill the biggest time waster in language learning, which is stop agonizing over which variety of Spanish to learn. I'm dead serious. I watch beginners lose months to one terrifying question. Should I learn Mexican Spanish? Spanish from Spain? Colombian Spanish? What if I pick the wrong one? The world's going to end. So let me end the panic right now. There is no wrong variety of Spanish. Spanish is Spanish. Now, yes, there are different varieties and there are different accents, the slang changes, but it's a bit like a New Yorker chatting to someone from London or Sydney. Different flavor, same language, the odd weird expression, especially those ones from Sydney, but they understand each other perfectly. You can learn your Spanish in Mexico, then walk into a cafe in Madrid or a beach house in Colombia and people will understand you just fine. The real danger is not choosing the wrong Spanish, it's spending so long choosing which variety to use that you will never actually start. Or obsessing over Colombian Spanish and refusing to touch anything, any material that's on Spanish from Spain or Mexican Spanish or whatever, because you think, oh, it's not the type. Just don't worry about it. Forget hunting for the perfect dialect, just set out to get as much exposure as possible, wherever you can find it and whatever resource is in front of you. Don't worry about running dry because there is more Spanish content than you could throw a stick at. In fact, don't find yourself something to read right away, like these books of short stories that I wrote. Never stress about, oh, I can't use that book, it's a different dialect, it doesn't matter. Use the book, watch the show, listen to the podcast, just start. And if you want to spoil yourself with an endless supply of amazing stories at your exact level, you could always try my brand new story learning app and get cracking, link in the description. Because every month you spend worrying about dialects is a month that you could have spent speaking Spanish and whether you call it a cocodrilo, a caiman or a yacare, a crocodile is still a crocodile. But now you've got seven cheat codes to help you deal with it. So there you go. Grab your free short story in Spanish to get you started, then pick one of these cheat codes and actually try using it today. And if you want to see exactly how I would go about learning Spanish from scratch, start to finish, if I had to do the whole thing over again, then that's all in this video. So go and check that out right now.