How I Became Fluent in Spanish in Less Than 3 Months
A language can be unlocked to reveal the magic that lies within.
Let me begin with an honest caveat and say that I was in semi-immersion when I achieved this. Before you go away, you should know that it’s possible to find such an experience from almost anywhere these days. I will elaborate on this below.
As an international student pursuing a Master’s degree in France, I had classmates from more than 30 countries across the world. My course was in English and one of my main reasons for choosing France was to fulfill my childhood dream of living in the country and learning French. 7 of my 14 classmates were Mexican and I spent most of my time with them. I was picking up French very quickly and figuring out how the language worked.
I picked up phrases and expressions, used them on others, analysed their reaction and decided whether what I said was right or wrong. I then went back to my room, took the sentence apart and put it back together. It was like finding a mental tool box.
My Mexican friends were a close-knit group and I was part of the gang. But I was the only one who spoke no Spanish barring “Hola” and “adios amigos” so they had to translate everything for me. One morning, I told myself that this was my opportunity to learn their language and that from that day on, they were to speak to me exclusively in Spanish. They were thrilled and my lessons began immediately.
Now these were not academic lessons. How many of us have attended 10 years of language classes in school and as adults can barely come up with a single sentence? Sounds familiar right?
Repetition is key
I got the best of both worlds. The girls taught me beautiful sentences and how to put them together while the boys, much to the girls’ disapproval, taught me an equally important skill: how to swear. So how did it work? Every day, they would greet me with “Hola! Como estas” to which I mechanically responded “Bien, y tú?”. This is was to teach me the most important lesson in language learning — developing automatisms at a subconscious level.
If I can say this much almost robotically without thinking, then I should strive to attain this level of automatism in every expression that I learn. How many people are conscious of the grammatical structure they frame in their mother tongue?
My takeaway from this was to set a target. Every day, I added a new word or sentence to the greeting I had already learnt and repeated it till I internalised it. Then I moved on to a new word or expression.
Since I was picking up French at the same time, I would use French words, change my accent and add an -o or an -a at the end and believe me, it worked more often than not. So another tip is to learn a second language which is in the same linguistic family as one you already know. For example, if you speak Icelandic, try Norwegian, Swedish or Danish. Some unrelated languages have surprisingly similar sounds. My language Kannada (in the same family as Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam) has alternating vowel and consonant sounds not dissimilar to Japanese and Korean.
Forget grammar, look for patterns instead
Well, at least forget it once you learn it. Some people need a classroom experience with systematic, academic lessons to learn a language. Others need to be in immersion. I would place myself somewhere between these two categories leaning much more to the latter.
When a baby learns its first words and then slowly starts making sentences which get increasingly longer with age and experience, it doesn’t understand grammar. Think of yourself as a baby in the new language and absorb everything you hear. I pretended to be a baby and took in everything I heard so much so that my friends sometimes called me Bob Esponja (SpongeBob)! In a couple of weeks, I had learnt a few verb conjugations and that was enough for me to guess my way through new verbs.
I applied the few verb conjugations I had learnt in Spanish to new, sometimes invented, verbs in sentences and quickly expanded my vocabulary. It is amazing how little one needs to know to generalise it to the rest of the language.
In French, if you memorise the conjugation of regular -er and -ir verbs, there’s already a whole lot you can achieve. This is what I mean by finding patterns.
Don’t ask why, ask how
Have you noticed how adults always want to why but when you correct children they seldom ask why but merely get on with their story with the corrected form?
Most adults I know waste time asking irrelevant questions like why a word is masculine or feminine. Or why an adjective is before or after a noun. Well, the simple (and unhelpful) answer is that, many centuries ago, someone decided that that was how it was going to be!
The right question to ask is how. When I was learning Spanish and French, I was more interested in how to make a sentence by putting words together in a specific order. And the next step was to figure out how to put these sentences together into a logical, coherent paragraph or idea. If I had allowed myself to get caught up in why rules of grammar were the way they were, I would have never learnt anything. I looked at it more like putting together the pieces of a puzzle.
Perfection is the enemy of fluency
Or at least an obsessive quest for perfection. As a language teacher, I have seen hundreds of students struggling to speak, or refusing to speak for fear of making mistakes.
Don’t become a victim of analysis paralysis. If you don’t make mistakes, you will never learn.
Just remember to not repeat them. I used to learn a verb with one friend, think of a sentence with it and then try it on another friend without worrying about whether it worked or not. I always asked them to correct me, which they did, and I then made a mental note of my error and tried to never repeat it. The point here though is not about correcting oneself. Whilst that is a crucial part of speaking a language well, you should not be afraid to put yourself out there and speak.
Remember that if your sentence is somewhat grammatically flawed but pronounced naturally, you will still be understood but if you spend too much time thinking about framing the perfect sentence, you might end up not speaking and turn off the person with whom you are speaking.
The takeaway from this point is to focus on sounding natural by imitating the rhythm and sounds of native speakers rather than seeking grammatical perfection. Seize the moment, let your words flow and go back to check your grammar in your own time.
Start speaking on day one and constantly seek feedback
Most of my students who join my French classes ask me when they will start speaking the language. The mistake is to assume that you have to wait until the end of the course or some point in the course to start speaking the language. I tell them that they have to start speaking right away and that statement often elicits surprise and confusion. If you learn a language in the target language without going through your mother tongue or your first language, then you start making the effort to understand it from the very beginning and you will be expected to make small sentences about yourself.
Once you learn this, it is crucial to analyse what you are saying based on the reactions of the people you communicate with. So it is extremely important to look for people who speak the language fluently and practise with them.
Work on your memory
It is important to not consult your notes. With technology at the tip of our fingers, we have become lazy and complacent and don’t make the effort to remember anything. The reflex is to ask one of the myriad robots like Google, Siri or Alexa. If you want to remember something, focus on the moment when you last heard it or used it and try to recall what it was.
When you are studying a language, don’t keep consulting tables in your manuel. Instead, close you book, put your phone away and concentrate on what it is you are looking for. If it helps, close your eyes or go for a walk and this could help you clear your head and bring back the word or meaning you are looking for.
Practise, practise, practise
Since I spent around 10–12 hours a day with my Latin American friends, I had plenty of opportunity to practise. Even so, I had to shed my inhibitions, not care about whether what I said made sense or not and just go out there and speak.
Every time I didn’t know a word, I asked. The worst thing you can do is to let pride and ego get in the way of learning.
In around two and a half months, I had almost seamlessly transitioned from English to Spanish and my friends and I just stopped speaking in English. In fact, I can’t even imagine speaking to them in English today. 12 years later, without ever having lived in a Spanish-speaking country or attending a single class, I can still speak Spanish, not perfectly but fluently. There is still much that I need to learn but I can sustain a long, fairly complex conversation guessing my way through a lot of it without ever giving the impression that I am searching for words or not understanding every word being spoken.
Immerse yourself in the language
Not everyone has the good fortune of being in the situation I was in but with the technology that is available today, there are plenty of ways to create an illusion of immersion. If you are reading this article, you either have a smartphone or a computer or both. You can download apps like Meetup or just post a message on some social network saying you want to do a language exchange. Spend a few hours a week practising with a language partner.
Use the power of internet to listen to the radio, podcasts, songs, watch videos, series and films to create an immersive experience. Once you take the plunge, nothing can stop you from attaining fluency.
To summarise, aim to produce sentences almost unconsciously, learn something new every day and repeat it until it becomes a part of you and you develop an instinct. Look for patterns and once you find them, use them as keys to unlock the structure of sentences. Then shed your inhibitions and use them with real people. Focus on being natural and fluent rather than being grammatically perfect and keep practising to get feedback and self-correct.
Muchas gracias a todos mis amigos hispanohablantes!
Hi, I am Prajwal Madhav. I hope you enjoy my posts. If you want to learn French with me, feel free to contact me.
