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HOW TO BECOME FLUENT
I am now fluent in Spanish. The way I learned is I started out listening to the 5 RAPANESE SPANISH cassettes and cd's. I listened to them for about 4 months every time I got into my car. After I could not get any more milk out of this cow I tried to figure out how to keep learning. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area so I switched my radio dial to Radio Romantica, love songs in Spanish 100.3 FM. It's like easy listening rock. It was weird at first but after a few weeks I was hooked. The strangest thing was that I actually enjoyed the commercials because they were so repetetive. When I watched tv and there was a commercial I would switch my dial to a mexican station and watch the Spanish commericials. Also I got myself a pen pal in Mexico. I went to one of the free translation web sites and would write in English and type out the translation in Spanish. I learned a lot this way. Also if you rent a dvd just put on the Spanish subtitles. Some times you can watch the movie in Spanish with English subtitles. Another cool way to learn is walk into any bookstore and look for a book written in Spanish and then find the same book written in English. Read a page in Spanish then read the same page in English. The books I have read are Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Harry Potter was a lot easier to handle. Lord of the Rings was a bit over my head. The main thing is that to learn a language forget going to school to learn. That's too boring. It's all about changing habits one day at a time. These tricks don't work as well if you don't use the Rapanese first. The trick is that now you know the 20% of the words that are used 80% of the time. The rest is just filling in the blanks, literally. I know these methods work because it is the way I have learned Spanish. You don't remember struggling to learn English it just happened. The same can be said for Spanish or any other foreign language. I have friends that can correct my grammar in Spanish but cannot speak Spanish. They cannot carry on a relaxing conversation. They say the Mexicans talk too fast. Duh! Don't worry about the grammar. That comes later. Learn how to speak first. You can pick up proper grammar buy just reading Spanish books. There are some things that belong in the classroom like Math and Science but not a foreign language. I had a friend that had 3 years of Spanish. I asked her if she new what a "golpe" was. She had no idea. Golpe means a punch or hit, rather an important word wouldn't you think. People tell me that to learn a language you have to speak it constantly. You can't speak if you don't know the language. You have to have the repetition. |