As the title states, I am interested in learning to speak Spanish. Any suggestions on how to go about this? Is it even possible?
I took three years in high school and I remember some verbs and nouns but I can’t put together a sentence so I would pretty much have to start from the beginning. I am going to need all the help I can get.
Telemundo!
If you’ve got cable TV, you’ve got spanish language lessons. (Sabado Gigante is excellent) 
I’ve never been able to follow Otromundo. It moves way, way to fast for me.
On the other hand, I’ve picked up a lot of spanish just by working with Mexican guys and teaching English to Mexican kids. It’s a nice language. Fewer quirks than english (as far as I can tell, anyway). Find people, hang around them, absorb. And learn how to ask them to slow down.
Practice Makes Perfect
501 Spanish Verbs
Dict in backpack
Invitaciones
I too took Spanish for three years and it did nothing for me. Then one semester I had a combination of (a) the perfect teacher for me and (b) a girlfriend who spoke Spanish natively, and everything clicked together perfectly. That’s the luck of the draw, but you don’t need to have a confluence of events like that.
However, I do suggest taking a first-semester college Spanish class to guide your studies. My Spanish class used this book, “Invitaciones”, which although being a textbook could also serve as a great independent study guide if you do all the exercises in order. It’s a “workbook”, meaning you actually do the exercises by writing in the book and it’s mostly exercises, with enough explanation that you can do them. It’s better with a teacher, but it’s good by itself too. It comes with video and audio CDs and the book has a lot of exercises that go off what you see and hear in the CDs. (Which were filmed at Southwestern College here in San Diego, BTW.) The actors will never crack Hollywood but the audio and video brings you gradually into Spanish as spoken by native speakers; it’s stiff and grammatical when you need it to be and later (in the second part, especially) it relaxes and you get more of a taste of how native speakers actually talk to each other.
Other than that, immersion, immersion, immersion. I don’t know where you live, but if there’s any way you can throw yourself into environments where you’ll have to speak Spanish–a good time to do this is when you’ve covered almost but not quite a semester’s worth of material IMO–that will really help you seal the deal. You’ll be frustrated at first, but gradually it will become easier and easier to say what you want to say. It’s all about practice, practice, practice.
501 Spanish Verbs is an ESSENTIAL reference. It has a decent verb dictionary but what’s really important is that it has full conjugation tables in every tense for most of the more useful verbs in the language. Pretty much all the irregularities are covered, too.
The Practice Makes Perfect series of workbooks is pretty decent, although I’ve only done the very beginning of the verb tenses one.
Oh yeah—Immersion, immersion, immersion.
Like baseball? Here is a baseball English-Spanish dictionary; start there, find your local Spanish-language baseball radio or TV station, and try to follow the games that way. If you’re using the radio, a baseball scorecard ($2 at Sports Authority or any similar store) will help you keep track of your progress in understanding what’s going on. The Major League Baseball website has a “Gameday” feature that will show you the current progress of every game so that if you get hopelessly lost you can set yourself on track and start over.
Finally, this is my Spanish-English dictionary of choice. It translates a lot of Commonwealth and American slang to Spanish and a lot of Castilian and Latin-American slang to English pretty well, and includes explanations in English of Spanish-language idioms, political parties and government bodies, cultural stuff, etc. as well as a section in English about life in Spanish-speaking countries and a section in Spanish about life in English-speaking countries. The latter is great because you can tie the language in to something you’re already familiar with–the culture and government of your home country.
Whoops. Left my notes at the top of the post.
Or a good telenovela. Sure, you’ll be more ready to have an affair with the long lost son of a business tycoon who is trying to prove his way in the world without his father’s money than to find a bathroom.
But really, which situation would you rather be prepared for?
My college uses Invitaciones for the first two semesters of Spanish (I think; if it’s not, then it’s something with an incredibly similar name). For the third and fourth, we use a book called Enfoques: Curso intermedio de lengua española (In Focus: An intermediate course in the Spanish language). There’s a workbook available separately, which I strongly encourage you to buy. The textbook comes with an interactive CD that’s actually quite good, despite the hokey little man that pops up and goes ¡Bien hecho! while waving around a big foam finger whenever you get a question right on the quizzes. It also includes a little soap opera/sitcom about the staff at the office for a magazine, which I enjoy. It’s nice because you can choose to read along with a script while listening, and that helps me a lot. The listening labs that go with the workbook are good, if annoying at times.
If you want any help with the basic stuff, feel free to email me. I jump into the world of advanced grammar next semester, so fun times are ahead for me.
¡Buena suerte! Disfruta la lengua española.
After four semesters, how fluent are you now? Can you hold a conversation?
It depends. My knowledge of everyday slang isn’t so hot–I just know a couple of really big swears and none of the little, “ladylike” curses. It’s really not the kind of thing you can ask about in class. So, I’d be fine having a fairly simple, polite conversation and probably wouldn’t have any problems making my way through Spain or metropolitan Latin/South America, but I don’t have the ease and grace of a native speaker. (There’s a weird relationship between the native speakers on campus and the people who are learning to speak, so there’s not much help there.) I read and write much better than I speak, for the most part.
Sorry for the hijack, but could you expand on this a little?
When I was in college, I found that there was often some tension between those learning a language and bilingual native speakers.
This is a hugely broad brush of course, many of my linguist friends seemed to have an attitude that the native speakers should be ‘grateful’ that the learners were ‘showing respect for their culture’. There was also some contempt/jealousy at work.
This is a bit of a special case (everyone who speaks welsh also speaks english, more or less) but as a native welsh speaker I did sometimes get frustrated with people who would insist on having a conversation in welsh when it would clearly be much easier in english - I felt like I was being used as a living museum.
Cheers,
welshboy
Thanks for all the advice. I will probably get Invitaciones and see how that works out.
Miss Purl, I may take you up on that offer.
Pretty much everything you said meshes with what I’ve experienced so far, though I think non-native speakers who hold native speakers in contempt are just dumber than a box of rocks. I think there’s also some weirdness because the native speakers were most likely encouraged all through elementary/middle school and high school to speak English at all times, and suddenly people that they know through school are asking them to speak Spanish. I think there may be a feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop–this is cool, but what’s going to happen next?
As for the “no help there” thing, I meant that I’m not comfortable approaching someone I don’t know well who may already have a chip on their shoulder. It’s just rude to do that without a prior relationship, and I’m not going to make friends with someone just so I can one day talk them into being my Spanish practice partner. Everyone deserves to be defined by more than the language they speak.
melondeca, feel free to email me, just pop SDMB in the subject the first time you do so it doesn’t get sent to my junk mail folder.
I hereby propose that Dopers learning Spanish or wanting to brush up on it (or native speakers who want to help others learn) exchange email addresses and maybe even phone numbers for Spanish practice, as we’ll all know that we can speak Spanish to each other without putting one another off. Anyone who’s for this, email me and we’ll see what we can do.
That’s a great idea, fetus. An email is winging its way to your inbox.
Like any other skill, learning a language is done best by using the language.
I took classes in French in high school, but didn’t really learn it until I was forced to use it on an exchange program in France. I ended up majoring in French in college (and got an MA and an ABD in French Linguistics), and spent a total of three years living in France. When I lived in France, I had the radio tuned in to Talk Radio programs as often as I could, even just as background “noise.” I did not have regular access to television, but I watched TV when I could. I also read French newspapers, French novels, and spent as much time with French-speaking people as possible. I now consider myself fluent in French–both oral and written–and I have no problems making myself understood in French.
I have tried to learn Spanish. I actually took Spanish classes in fourth grade, when my family lived in Texas, and I had to take a year of Spanish for my PhD. I have had Spanish-speaking friends, who would converse amongst themselves in Spanish in my presence, while I tried to follow the conversation. I have tried to read novels in Spanish, when I can find them, but I spend so much time looking up words that I lose the gist of the story. I spent three weeks in Spain when I lived in France, but never understood a single word that anyone around me said (except for the Moroccan who spoke to me in French on a train). But I get almost nada from these experiences.
There is one Spanish-language radio station where we live. After listening to the same infomercial for a “male enhancement product” every afternoon for a week, I couldn’t take it anymore. We have basic DishNetwork, which has little Spanish-language programming. I don’t have time to sit at a computer to listen to Spanish-speaking streamed programs.
I do understand Spanish if I hear the same content three or four times in a row, but I cannot speak it at all. When I do try to speak Spanish, it all comes out in French instead. :smack: I have come to the realization that if I really want to learn Spanish, I will have to commit to spending six months or more in a Spanish-speaking environment, and I don’t see that happening any time soon.
I can speak more Spanish than I could before I started working at my current job, but it’s very little more and it’s very limited in scope. Basically, I can tell a client to pick a PIN number for their EBT benefits card, then let them know when they can use it.
“Necesita poner quatro numeros de secreto de su PIN.”
“Usted puede utilizar su tarjeta en una hora.”
God forbid someone needs to ask me a question about the cards…
I would say that you could probably teach yourself to read and write any language just fine, but in order to speak it and to understand it when it is spoken, you need prolonged contact with speakers. Well, the speaking part may not require other speakers (depending on how good you are at the pronunciation), but understanding it and building the skills necessary for conversational use is not something you can teach yourself.
This is my biggest problem – I can read or write pretty much anything I want to in Spanish, especially if the topics are daily conversation subjects, like TV, cooking, shopping, or small talk stuff, and I can read it fast enough to keep up with the closed captioning on TV, but I have serious difficulties with spoken Spanish. There are certain people whom I know very well with whom I can converse, but only because I’m used to their pronunciation quirks and active vocab, but in a situation with a stranger, I can’t just march up and guarantee that I’ll understand what they’re saying. I can usually make myself understood fairly well (to the point where I am often asked where I’m from, or where my parents are from – they usually guess Puerto Rico or Colombia), but the reverse is not always true.
As far as my experience with learning it, I had 2 semesters of college-level, but I basically taught myself because my professor was worthless and the classes were graduation requirements. The students cared less than the prof, so I did most of my learning on my own.
So I would say a limited “yes”… You can teach yourself to speak Spanish, but not necessarily to understand it when spoken.
Pero, déjame desearte buena suerte con tus estudios, y no tengas miedo de pedirme ayuda con ellos – that is to say, e-mail me if you need anything.
In truth, you have no real choice but to teach yourself a language. No other method works.
I am an English teacher. I speak a bit of Spanish. I have spent years in classes. Despite that, it is really the time I spend on an exercise bike mutter Spanish verb conjugations to myself that are when I really learn.