If you're as enthusiastic to learn to speak Spanish as I was when I first began studying the language, you'll be wanting to speak Spanish in as little time as is possible! To help you speed-up the learning process, here are five of my favourite top tips to not only help you learn to speak Spanish quickly, they'll make learning Spanish lots of fun too!
1. Studying Spanish is just one part of the challenge. For me, I find studying the language the easiest part. Without doubt, the hardest part is tuning your ear in to the sound of the language. It is absolutely vital to listen to Spanish everyday for as long as you can. An hour is perfect, half-an-hour great, but less than fifteen minutes isn't going to help much but it's better than nothing. As well as using your formal Spanish course materials, you could try the following ideas:
Go to You Tube and search for videos in Spanish. Some ideas for you to provide grist for your creative mill:
Spanish Weather Forecast
Recetas de Cocina - (Recipes in Spanish)
Search for music to listen to and a canny idea here is when you've found a song, use your favorite search engine to find the lyrics so you can read them while listening. A few artists for you to get you started:
Luz Casal, Carlos Santana, Julieta Venegas, Shakira, Eros Ramazzotti, Enrique Iglesias
All of this will help tune your ear into the Spanish language, and it's a lot of fun too!
2. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Fear of maklng mistakes can hold back progress and even makes some people so frightened they avoid speaking Spanish as much as possible. Accept that you will make mistakes, you are not a native speaker so it's inevitable! The idea is to speak Spanish as often as you can and what will happen is that native speakers will respect you for making the effort and will be keen to help you. Have fun with Spanish and accept that you'll make mistakes, but you'll learn from them and they will help you to improve your Spanish. As a famous Spanish idiom goes:
El error más grande no es decir nada - The biggest mistake is to say nothing
3. A tip from my very good friend Miguel, who speaks English so well he studied bioinformatics to degree level in England! He told me one of his secrets was to read as much English poetry as he could. This is one very canny tip to help you learn to speak Spanish quickly and here are some famous Hispanic and Spanish poets for you to search for online:
Frederico García Lorca
Jorge Luis Borges
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
Rubén Darío
Or, pop over to Amazon and grab a copy of:
Treasury Of Spanish Love Poems, Quotations and Proverbs By Juan Serrano
4. Having a large Spanish vocabulary is going to help you communicate very effectively when speaking Spanish so set a goal: For five days each week, learn 5 new words from a topic relevant to your life. For example:
Food, drink, office, supermarket, pharmacy, body - hobbies, for me this would be music, soccer, cookery, philosophy and cinema - dating, city life, fitness, beauty, family, travel, streets, parties, dating, garden, socialising and so on. Five days of five new words = 25 new words a week = 100 new words a month. And as your skill level increases, you could raise the goal to 10 new Spanish words a day or even 5 new Spanish words and 5 new Spanish phrases. Setting goals like this is a smart way to quickly build a large Spanish vocabulary covering a wide-range of topics so you add greater variety and depth to your Spanish.
5. The Internet now enables you to read Spanish newspapers at the click of a button! Try to read an article from a Spanish newspaper everyday, and have an online Spanish translator opened up in a second window. Just type in "Spanish newspaper" or "Hispanic newspaper" into a search engine. Another great and easy way to familiarise yourself with how Spanish is constructed and you'll also build your Spanish vocabulary quickly too.
You may find these websites of interest:
http://www.lavanguardia.es/
http://www.elmundo.es/
http://www.europapress.es/
http://www.librepensadores.com/
http://www.biznews.com.mx
http://www.elmercurio.com.mx/
http://www.lacronica.com
Lots of really canny and cool ideas there to help you learn Spanish quickly. And if you'd like to speak Spanish with punch and realism by speaking Spanish as it is spoken on the streets and rarely taught in formal Spanish courses, then you'll find further Spanish articles containing lots of vibrant Spanish phrases over on the Streetwise Spanish website.
