How to Study Spanish pt 2: How to Speak Spanish!

Posted on June 6, 2016September 19, 2016 by admin

Learning how to speak Spanish, or any language for that matter is a tremendous task.

Bilingual volleyball game!

Our previous blog entries have attempted to mount the argument that learning a language is a holistic approach, and that there is no one single way of going about it. We’ve briefly introduced the materials, we’ve started to look at a program and some methods – learning vocabulary, tackling grammar and to a degree, writing. Still, we’re only halfway there, and I can say without any doubt that getting out there and speaking spanish, alongside writing, is the single most important thing you can do. Welcome to the latest entry on how to divide your study time throughout the week!

Why learning how to Speak Spanish is the Most Important thing

So why is speaking the most important thing to do? Because when you sit there and listen to the teacher rattle on, or when you sit there half taking in your online lesson on youtube, you’re only partially taking in what it is you’re supposed to be doing or learning. Don’t get me wrong, teachers are good guides and mentors, and listening to online tutorials and instructions that have some great advice or explanation on a grammatical topic can be amazing. However, what it ultimately comes down to is ‘workshopping’.

If you had to learn how to do a new job, what would be the best way to learn the ropes? Would you watch an instructional video? Would you look at a diagram? Would you read up on it? Would you let someone tell you or show you how to do it? All of those things serve a purpose, and they count, but first and foremost, the number one thing which will enable you to commit your tasks to memory is the actual process of doing it. Do you guys hold down professional jobs? Do you play a musical instrument? Are you a great sports person? Language learning is no different.

Bringing this Scenario back to the World of Learning a Language…

Everything we mentioned before about holding down a job, sports training, and pretty much every other pursuit involves watching videos and diagrams, reading instructions and listening to the experts etc. In the world of second languages, this translates to reading explanations from your books, and listening to your teacher or any number of instructional videos found online (as well as other) resources. Again, these are great, but the process of actually doing it, i.e. the most important part, comes from you. In the context of language-learning, this takes the shape of writing and speaking.

Not convinced? “Why writing and speaking? Why not reading? Why can’t I listen to a podcast or watch my favourite film in Spanish?” you ask. Well, you can. Those things are fun to do, and they serve a purpose, but to learn anything major from reading will require you to read huge volumes of materials. That’s great if you already have a great level of Spanish, but you might not. The other problem with reading, is that it’s similar to listening, in that it is often a passive activity. If you had to learn how to say something in Spanish, which would be the best way? Would you try an retain it by hearing it from someone? Would you read it, memorise it and then store it away for later use? Well, sort of.

How Many of us Remember…

…revising for exams in high school and university? You took lecture notes, right?

Many of us remember that rather than just reading something, noting it down is far more effective. Likewise, hearing something is fine, but what works better is actually listening to and engaging with someone in a situation where you are required to respond and contribute to the conversation. Speaking and writing force you to think in Spanish. You are effectively rewiring your neural pathways to function in ways that were previously not possible. You are creating new reflexes, new skills, new everything. Yeah, it’s hard work, and you’ll feel like you’ve run a gauntlet after a study or conversation session. You may feel as though you need to take a break every once in a while, but you know that it’s working…

Programming your Time…

I digress…this post is about speaking Spanish, and allocating at least an hour at some point in the week as part of a fixed study regimen. Let’s cover some ways that you might go about practising your speaking skills. There are plenty to choose from!

Spend an hour speaking with another student or go on Gumtree or some other site and look for a conversational partner. Do half an hour in English and half an hour in Spanish or be selfish and just speak Spanish. However, don’t just speak for an hour in English because your Spanish is ‘bad’ or you’re nervous. If you don’t speak Spanish, you will have achieved nothing other than ensuring the other person walks away speaking better English.
Join a language group and just speak Spanish for an hour. Bring a list of conversational questions and some bottles of wine to get things flowing. Most of the groups which run these types of sessions are free. Here’s one that we run, called ‘Language Swap: English/Spanish’. Not the most original name, but I didn’t come up with it!
Hire a private tutor and do a one-on-one session for an hour or more. It’s totally up to you, and there are plenty of tutors out there who will tailor the classes to the sorts of things you want, and who are flexible with times.
Make Spanish-speaking friends in hobby groups, language swaps, etc. Maintain contact with them and see if you can get into a routine of speaking Spanish and English, to even-out the work load and make it a more reciprocal experience.

Language exchange groups are a fun way to practise Spanish and make new friends.

Some Additional Points Regarding how to Approach Speaking

Try to keep a notepad and pen handy. Writing down unfamiliar expressions and vocabulary will allow you to remember it more easily for next time. It will give you something to research and incorporate into another study session when you get home.
Get your conversation partner to correct you! You can ask them me corriges por favor? (can you correct me please?)
Most of all it’s important to remember to have a relaxed attitude when you do this. Not confident enough? Who cares!? No one cares about the mistakes that you make, but people will love the fact that you are having a go at speaking another language….and that you are determined to go further. It doesn’t matter if you make mistakes. Ever.

So that concludes a brief summary on the value of speaking Spanish – or at least trying – on a regular basis, and ensuring that it is one of the most important things in a study regimen. Next, we’ll look at a study session dedicated to writing. While you’ll get plenty of this done when you study grammar, it’s really important that you dedicate time to working on your writing skills in more of a free-style environment. This involves getting a bit creative and getting a bit social. Most importantly, in the same vein as this entry, it involves just relaxing and not being afraid to make mistakes!

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Salsa & Latin Music in Melbourne: Multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s

Posted on June 2, 2016July 2, 2016 by admin

Multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s takes on a new flavour

This is the third part on Salsa and Latin music in Melbourne, 1970 – 2008. To read about what led up to the events discussed in this blog entry, have a look at the previous post.

The Johnston St. Fiesta in full force, 2007. Australia had an awakening to experience well before we could have events like this.

With a sizeable number of Latin American immigrants…

…the time was ripe for the emergence of certain forms of Latin music, which took root in the country’s cosmopolitan centres such as Melbourne and Sydney. It was not long before Melbourne was hearing Colombian-Caribbean music styles such as the cumbia and mapale with amateur groups such as Sonido Latino leading the new sound.[1] In 1979, future Latin folk music icon Justo Díaz migrated from Argentina, bringing some of the first well-known types of folk music such as the politicized New Song to Australian shores. The same year, Díaz formed the group Papalote.[2]

Melbourne festivals such as Fitzroy’s Johnston Street Fiesta, made official in 1978, and Moomba, in addition to other community and social functions which took place throughout the decade, were hosts to these sounds. These events, despite many of them being part of bigger festivals, tended to be local, small-scale affairs run by and for the various Latino communities.[3]

Unlike the diaspora-associated popularity boom of salsa in other parts of the world at the time, Australia had never received a large influx of Cuban or Puerto Rican immigrants. As a consequence, while people from places like Colombia and El Salvador did play certain styles of Caribbean music, live salsa, with perhaps the exception of recorded music at community events, did not tend to figure prominently in the musical repertoires of such places.

Not Salsa in Melbourne! The Latin Music scene was largely the result of Puerto Rican urban immigration to the Ghettoes of New York, taken from Salsa: Latin Pop Music in the Cities, 1988, dir. Jeremy Marre.

Multiculturalism Unsteadily Creeps in

The second effect of the abolition of the policy was the shift from a discourse of a unified culture, to one of multiculturalism. This change was a gradual process, however, fraught with problems, some of which included an unwillingness to embrace the new political approach. The infamous ‘Great Immigration Debate’, which took place during the Hawke government era, giving us outspoken politicians such as Geoffrey Blainey, had highlighted some of the difficulties and areas of contention with this new political direction. Criticisms on high expenditures on multicultural programs abounded, and the debate had taken on racist overtones, reminiscent of the rhetoric of the ‘yellow peril’.[4]

Even if racist doctrines posed an obstacle to the new approach, who was to say that the idea of ‘race’ had not moved away from its practises based on biological notions of difference, to instead become recoded as ‘culture’, which would see the rise of a newer, more insidious type of racism?’[5] Ho, in a study published in 1990, discusses the ways that in spite of the new ideas regarding multiculturalism, power had still been insidiously kept out of reach from migrant communities by an Anglo-Celtic power base.

Geoffrey Blainey embodied certain anti-immigration sentiment in the 1980s. The road to multiculturalism was not a smooth one. Did we ever get there? credit: http://www.australianoftheyear.org.au/honour-roll/?view=fullView&recipientID=198

The Acceptance of a Multicultural Australia

In spite of such developments, Ho argues that at the turn of the decade, there existed above all, confusion, or a lack of understanding regarding what the new policy actually entailed.[6]

People saw multiculturalism as the new social reality; a reality that was in line with the nation’s interests and ideas about social justice. The proliferation of migrant shops, along with dynamic cultural interactions, had also created a perceived cultural and social enrichment.[7] The end of the 1980s saw that the idea of multiculturalism had, to a degree, helped reconcile the notion of an explicitly racist and isolationist notion of national identity, with one characterised by greater openness and acceptance of cultural diversity.[8] This perceived cultural dynamism and acceptance, in the wake of a transformed Post-Second World War Australia, were the things which were partly responsible for bringing about new possibilities in terms of music. The grounds were now fertile for the spawning of new popular-cultural movements.

Multiculturalism at the end of the 1980s

It was now a buzzword on everybody’s lips, and these years signalled a new epoch of desired cultural interaction, which could be seen reflected in a variety of forms, both in the arts and also in popular culture. In 1988, the Sydney Morning Herald reported on a production of Sounjata, a carnivalesque updating of an African legend. Sounjata related the exploits of a man from a humble background, who after becoming a king, united Western Africa to forge the ancient Mali Empire during the thirteenth century. The play was directed by a Spaniard, and performed by a Swiss with the support of two musicians and actors, one of whom was Chilean, the other Uruguayan.[10] The report stressed the cultural makeup in the performance in a way that would seem odd today, and it was one among many which indicated Australia’s new fascination and curiosity with cultural diversity.

Naturally, many observers saw this in the music scene, with the beginnings of multicultural music events. Event and concert guides which were frequently referred to with regards to multiculturalism graced the pages of Australian newspapers. These papers referred to musicians of Anglo-Australian origin not as musicians, but ‘multicultural musicians’.[11]

Conclusion

So that concludes our look at some of the dimensions of multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s, and we’re probably halfway. Next we look at the arrival of salsa itself on the music scene. Who were the biggest proponents of the sound? Who was the market? Read on about the journey of Salsa and Latin music in Melbourne…

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Hispanic Culture & Language: Typical Spanish and Latin American Food

Posted on May 30, 2016June 30, 2016 by admin

Welcome to part two on Spanish and Latin American Culture and Language. Last time, we briefly discussed the history of Spanish and Latin American food around the world. In this entry, we’re going to focus more on the present, with an exploration of typical Spanish and Latin American food.

Fernet in Argentina

Traditional and Typical Spanish and Latin American Food

Traditional food is translated as comida típica (typical food) in the Spanish-speaking world. This contrasts the likeness of the traditional and the everyday in what are often developing countries with that of ‘traditional’ meaning ‘old’ in more developed ones.

Eating out in Latin America

Latin America has a range of foods you’ll find in markets, at food stands, bus terminals and in all kinds of restaurants.

We begin our virtual food tour in Mexico, where some typical dishes that you’re likely to encounter include the ever-present tacos. Tacos are nothing like the majority of tacos you’ll find in English-speaking countries. Made with corn flour (maiz de harina), tacos tend to be soft, and contain real chunks of meat (tacos al pastor), as opposed to ground beef. Shrimp tacos are also really popular.

In Central America, places like El Salvador offer their version of the taco. Pupusas are pieces of flat bread, again made with corn flour, and stuffed with fillings such as cheese and beans.

The Colombian and Venezuelan equivalent is the arepa, which is a harder, thicker type of tortilla, but toasted. Generally served with toppings like cheese on top in Colombia, the Venezuelans prefer to stuff theirs with anything from egg, to ground meat. There is also a northern Colombian version which contains an egg inside as well! Gallo pinto (translated as ‘speckled rooster’) is a dish of rice and beans found in Costa Rica, which goes by a variety of names in other Central American countries.

Ecuador, Peru and Chile

The Andean countries of Peru and Ecuador boast something you will not find commonly in other parts of the Americas – the cui, or guinea pig. Here, the cui is not a pet, but rather a bit of a food specialty. People either fry, roast or grill cui. It also comes complete with a look of surprise. Anticuchos are another classic, which are skewers of meat or heart, and are very common at street stalls throughout the country. Ceviche is perhaps one of the most famous dishes of the region, and consists of fish and other mixed seafood cooked in lemon juice.

Fried guinea pig – street food, but also a specialty in some parts.

Peru, the Gastronomy Capital…

While found in Peru, Ecuador and Chile (and to a lesser degree in several other countries) ceviche is a real favourite from Peru, and has garnered international recognition alongside tacos and other famous Latin American foods. In fact, next to Mexico, Peru is one of the Latin American countries most famous for its food, and is quickly gaining a global audience.

An interesting side note is that Peru is the country responsible for bringing charcoal chicken and chips to the world. Known as pollo a la brasa, legend has it that a Peruvian introduced the idea of coal-cooked rotisserie chickens to Australia! No Melbourne high street would be incomplete without this Peruvian addition.

This gastronomical Andean country also has a famous drink known as pisco, a fermented grape spirit common at parties. There is much debate over which is the actual country of origin, as people enjoy pisco all over Peru and Chile. Still, peruvians and Chileans have often hotly-debated this point of contention! In Chile, you’ll find the omnipresent completo, a hotdog served with avocado and mayonnaise. Something you’re also likely to come across in this country is the churrasco, Chile’s answer to the steak sandwich!

Argentinian parrillada

Argentina and Uruguay

These two countries are both famous for their sweets, which come in the form of alfajores (a type of shortbread) and of course facturas, a breakfast pastry with a clear European influence. Every heard of a media luna? Thats a half moon….or a croissant.

Another common dish found out and about is the milanesa, a type of chicken or beef schnitzel served with a number of toppings. After scoffing down a milanesa, you can head out and have a fernet or two (a fermented alcoholic drink made with herbs and spices). The flavour of fernet has been likened to a cross between liquorice mixed with toothpaste and alcohol. Yum! I personally love it, and the Argentines do too, especially with Coca Cola (called a fernetcola).

Last but not least is the Argentinian (and Uruguayan) BBQ, or parrillada. Salad lovers move along please…nothing to see here…

Milanesa de pollo (a type of schnitzel-type chicken dish)

Similarities between countries when eating out in Latin America.

The differences are numerous. For instance, fried green plantains are very common. They’re called tostones in Mexico and Central America, tachinos is Cuba, and patacones in Colombia, Venezuela and Ecuador.

Another common street food consists of corn or rice with meat or fish, wrapped and steamed in a banana leaf. This is called a tamal in Central America and Colombia, and hallacas in Venezuela. In Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, they are known as humitas. The variety of ingredients between each region and country is astounding, ranging from sweet, to salty and savoury.

Finally, is the empanada. The world famous empanada is a turnover made from normal flour, containing any combination of beef, cheese, olives, egg, and is commonly found in places Argentina and Chile, where it’s baked, but sometimes fried. It’s also common all over Colombia, where locals generally make it from corn flour, pork and rice, and then fry it.

Eating out in Spain

Spain needs no introduction as a world food hub. In recent years, Spanish food has shot onto the international scene, perhaps taking the place (alongside other international cuisines) of French food as the new go-to food of interest.

Southern Spain

This might be the best place to start, as it’s understood to be the home of the ubiquitous tapa. Tapa is a word originating from tapar (to cover), and this is exactly what people used to do – cover their drinks with a piece of food to stop the flies getting at it. Since then, the custom has developed into the famous quick bar-food that is famous Spain-wide and all over the world.

Tapas are so engrained in the social and nightlife of people from southern Spain, that they are usually free! I can’t imagine that happening in Melbourne anytime soon.

Albondigas (meatballs) in Barcelona

Tapas and other Famous things…

These come in all sorts of shapes, sizes and varieties, especially in cosmopolitan centres such as Madrid and Barcelona. Some common ingredients include albóndigas (meatballs), boquerones (anchovies) and patatas (potatoes). This last option you will find in the popular patatas bravas, which are fried potato cubes served with a hot sauce, or mayonnaise. Larger servings of tapas are known as raciones, while tapas are known as pintxos (pronounced ‘pinchos’) in Basque country.

While found all over Spain, and having gained international recognition, jamón (cured ham) finds its main home in southern and south-western Spain.

Why can’t we have these kind of delis on every corner in Melbourne?

Valencia is the home of Paella. Originally, paella was made from whatever the farmers could find to put in it (rabbit, chicken, snails). While paella of this variety is still around, its most famous and modern incarnation is that of the famous rice and seafood (or chicken) dish that is found all over the world today. There are few things more alluring than the sight of a giant paella being cooked on coals in the town square (plaza), as people sing and party into the evening.

Pouring cider in the street in Asturias. Not actually in the street…you know what I mean.

Northern Spain

The north offers an amazing array of food options, such as fabada asturiana (a bean and wild boar stew). Another common sight in the province of Asturias is that of people raising their cider bottles high and pouring the dry-tasting liquid into glasses to oxygenate the drink.

Next up, we turn from the most famous street foods of Spain and the Americas, and look at everyday food at home and in the everyday local environment. We’ll also take a look at food customs and celebrations in the Hispanic world. Make sure to continue the journey!

typical-spanish-and-latin-american-food 3

Fabada asturiana…..nice.

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How to Study Spanish pt 2: How to Learn Spanish Grammar

Posted on May 26, 2016June 10, 2016 by admin

Grammar is usually fun…usually.

Our previous topic was the first in outlining the study sessions that we’ll need in order to study Spanish properly. “How to learn Spanish grammar” is going to be our second session.

Session 2: One hour of grammar. Learn one major rule or two small ones.

Spend twenty or so minutes reading about a specific grammar rule or two. These could be anything ranging from the basics of ser and estar to qué vs. cuál Try to retell it/them to yourself and make sure you understand it/them. Rewrite it/them again without looking at the original material, just to be sure. Repeat this process of writing it out from the source, retelling it and rewriting again as many times as you can within this 30 minute slot.
Allocate twenty minutes to recreating sentences using these grammar rules, again using the related grammar exercises (from your coursework) as templates, and apply the rule (s) as you write these sentences. Essentially you’re putting the rule into practise! Additionally, do an internet search for the name of the rule (s) or topic (s) and search for related exercises. Print them out or do them online. A lot of what’s on the internet is not that great, but a lot of it’s also really good, and it’s more effective than watching Who Wants to be a Millionaire reruns. While a lot can be said for using good sources and not picking up bad habits, the vast majority of people who are supposedly studying a language do not do their homework! So something is better than nothing, and if you’re reading over things and putting them to practical use, you’re winning! Here is one good website where you might find some useful exercises:

http://www.studyspanish.com/

Remember the beginner Spanish grammar book you were supposed to buy? Since chapters tend to arrange themselves around a rule or two, you could use these as inspiration to read over, retell and rewrite your topic, as well as using the actual exercises to get some ‘volume’ training in. When you’ve finished one book, get another one and churn through that one too! gain, it doesn’t matter how amazing the book is, or how much you learned from going through one of them start to finish. This is a long-term project (and a challenging one), so the most important thing is that you’re doing something.

For the last ten minutes, you could pick a few verbs and spend twenty minutes putting each verb into a couple of sentences. Choose the ‘person’ (yo, tú, él, ella etc.) at random for each verb. E.g.: Hablo español porque quiero viajar en España (I speak Spanish because I want to travel in Spain). Él habla inglés porque su mamá es inglesa (He speaks English because his mum is English). Hablamos español todo el tiempo (We speak Spanish all the time). Use the dictionary for unknown ‘filler’ words. Your vocabulary will increase from doing this as well, so can you see how your knowledge of vocabulary does not rely solely on your vocab-learning session? If some verbs are stubborn, throw them back into the mix the following week.

When not specifically doing exercises from your book or online, what sorts of things do you write about?Learning a language is supposed to be fun, so aside from the stuff that your teachers and grammar books tell you that you should know, use your study sessions to have a bit of fun and get creative. Ultimately, you’re not aiming to talk about things in Spanish which are vastly different from what you like to talk about in English. If anything, I’d imagine them to be the same. So try to write about things you like, or if you don’t have a high level of knowledge at this point, at least make them relevant to the sorts of things you are likely to say!

The same is applied to verbs. In the first few weeks you should typically start with regular –AR verbs, –ER verbs and –IR verbs. E.g.: trabajar, estudiar, vivir, necesitar etc. Within these first few weeks you should also learn the most important irregular /stem-changing verbs such as ser, esponer, querer,estar, tener, ir, hacer, etc. Can you see the pattern there? The idea is to learn the common and useful verbs which relate to everyday things. But after that, it’s up to you.

Perhaps you’re into cinema, so you might want to look up film vocabulary. Perhaps you want to express yourself about politics, in which case you might wish to investigate politically-related verbs. Open your verb book or dictionary and see what you can use!

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Salsa in Melbourne 1970-2008: Setting the Scene for Latin Music

Posted on May 26, 2016July 5, 2016 by admin

Sowing the Seeds for Latin Music in Melbourne

Hector Lavoe, famous Salsa singer.

Welcome to another exploration of Salsa and Latin music in Melbourne. You can find the previous entry by clicking on this link.

Post-War Globalisation

Salsa and other Latin music weren’t always as popular as they are in Melbourne today.In fact, Melbourne didn’t always have a sizeable Latin population. Let’s rewind to the end of the Second World War…

Post-war globalisation was an ever-hastening process which had brought rapid change to Australia, and certain events were soon to lead to the abolition of the White Australia Policy. Firstly, there were increased labour demands within the country.[1] It soon became apparent that immigration from Britain alone would not suffice in sustaining Australia’s economic and demographic growth.[2] Large-scale immigration from Europe, much of which came in the form of refugee movements, initially helped ease this demand.[3] The 1950s and 1960s saw mass immigration from Greece, Italy, and Malta, and by 1960, half of Australia’s immigrants were non-British.[4] Yet the recruitment of these migrants for labour eventually became more difficult, with many returning to their homelands.[5] Consequently, Australia became increasingly-lenient with its immigration policy.

When the world recession hit Australia during the 1970s, however, the country needed something more. Moreover, organisations such as The Immigration Reform Group, founded in 1959, had advocated an end to the policy,[6] and accusations of racism from both abroad, and within Australia itself, had been mounting for a long period of time.

The End of an Era

Human rights and the freedom of the individual were concepts which had also been gaining social and political currency,[7] and there was a push towards the idea that people’s life chances should not be unfairly hindered because of their place of birth, or some ethnic, racial, religious or linguistic affiliation.

[8] These factors combined, had enabled a climate whereby the White Australia Policy was no longer viable, and they led the government to rethink its attitudes towards immigration. A process of gradual dismantlement of the policy had been taking place towards the end of the 1960s, but it was 1973 which marked the decision of the new Labour Government to officially bring an end to the Policy’s era.[9]

The end of the White Australia Policy…and the beginning of something new?

In the Aftermath of the Policy

There were two primary effects which followed in the wake of the abolition of the policy. Firstly, the level of non-western European immigration to Australia rose dramatically. While important countries of migration such as Greece and Italy had previously enabled an expansion of cultural diversity within Australian society, the policy’s demise had ushered in an era of enhanced cultural efflorescence and activity, with people originating from a spectrum of countries, ranging from Vietnam to Afghanistan.

The 1970s and 1980s also witnessed the arrival of immigrants and refugees from parts of Latin America. Pinochet’s regime had toppled the Allende Government of Chile in 1973, Argentina and Uruguay had fallen to military coups in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and El Salvador had suffered a civil war in 1983. Consequently, the first ‘big wave’ of Latin immigration heralded from these countries. In 1986, there were 5,356 Chileans, 3,000 Argentines, 1,637 Uruguayans, and 1,275 Salvadorians living in Australia.[10]

While Latin American countries have generally not been considered to be large contributors of people throughout the history of Australian immigration,[11] the immigrants and refugees that they produced during the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the country’s expanding cultural diversity. The flourishing of hispanic culture in Australia and Latin music in Melbourne was imminent.

Pinochet’s regime toppled the Allende Government, causing an influx of refugees into Australia

In the Next Chapter…

In the next blog entry, we will look at the emergence of Latin music in Melbourne. Did it start with Salsa? Who were the Latin American people who started the scene? Were all of them Latin and where and in what form did early functions and events take place? How did new ideas regarding multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s foster this nascent scene? You can read about it all by clicking on this link.

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How to Study Spanish pt 2: How to Learn Spanish Vocabulary

Posted on May 23, 2016June 10, 2016 by admin

We left off last on the topic of how to create a study plan or program, and the value of creating a fixed study schedule of several one hour sessions per week. While the order (whether it’s vocabulary-building, conversation, grammar exercises etc.) is not too important, but since we’ve already established that a lot of people need a fixed program in order to guide them, “how to learn Spanish vocabulary” is going to be our first session.

Session 1: One hour of learning vocab (not verbs). Thirty words in total.

Write some flashcards with English on one side and Spanish on the other. Use them for twenty minutes and try to commit ten words to memory. One thing you might like to do is line the cards up on your left-hand-side, with the English words facing up. Pick them up, one by one, and try to say the Spanish word that corresponds. Keep doing this until you can get all of them. Now do the reverse, putting them back in a pile to the left, but this time with the Spanish words facing up. When you have learned all the words from English to Spanish and vice versa, put them in a jar. Keep growing this jar over the course of several months. When you have accumulated a number of ‘learned words’, take them out and start the process all over. You might have forgotten a large number, but the second time around, they will become more easily committed to memory.
For the next twenty minutes, write out a list of ten different words. Cover them and try to rewrite them. Try to commit all ten to memory.
Spend the last twenty minutes putting a different list of ten words into basic sentences. Use the rules regarding sentence structure you have learned from Spanish class and use sentences from the exercises as templates to form new sentences. E.g.: word: mango (mango). Voy a comer un mango (I’m going to eat a mango). Word: azúcar (sugar). El azúcar es muy dulce (sugar is very sweet).
Keep a log of all your learned words. Start writing your own homemade dictionary. There are heaps of possibilities. Remember that thirty words a week are over 1, 500 words a year (not including the other words you’ll pick up from your other study days).

how to learn spanish vocabulary

*Play around with the allocation of words, i.e.: after week one, transfer unlearned or stubborn words to different twenty-minute activities (don’t forget to keep adding new words). For instance, if the word entonces (so, then) didn’t get embedded in your brain via the flashcards, then add it to your list of words to put into sentences. To vary it even further, after a few weeks, you could allocate several one-hour sessions to just doing flash cards, or solely writing sentences with specific words.

So where do you get all these words? Try searching online for ‘100 most common words in Spanish’. I’m sure the search will yield multiple results! You could plunder the net for other vocabulary lists of common words (just google ‘common Spanish words’ or ‘essential Spanish words’ or something along those lines). Next, start to use any vocabulary lists provided in the coursework given to you by your Spanish school or tutor, as well as any grammar /exercise book (s) you may have. All memorised? Take a look around the house at all of the everyday domestic things which are now unrecognisable because of the papier maché coating of post-it stickers covering them. Add these things to your vocabulary lists. Exhausted everything in the house? Try the garden. Finished with that? When you’re out driving, walking the dog, in the shopping centre or walking the dog in the shopping centre, have a look around you and think of common objects to add, such as ‘traffic light,’ ‘sign’, ‘pavement’ etc. These are all important words and there are no shortages of word resources. Don’t stop until you have to start adding words like ‘quantum physics’, but even then you should probably not stop! Ok, that might be taking it a bit too far…for now…

Next up, learning grammar!

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How to Study Spanish pt 2: Making a Study Plan

Posted on May 23, 2016June 10, 2016 by admin

In this second part of the series on how to approach the Spanish language (check out the previous entry!) we are going to tackle the issue of making a study plan! “What?” you say… “Making a study program is easy! Motivation is the hard part!” We’ll address the issue of motivation later, but contrary to many peoples’ beliefs, making a study program is not as easy as it sounds. A lot of people have not studied since high school, and there are those of us who never did much of it anyway! Further to these impediments, is the fact that studying is a skill, and the methods involved are varied and not easily imparted. While we don’t purport to have all the answers to a fail proof study program, we hope to give you some tips. With a lot of practise and determination, you will no doubt get the hang of it, find your own groove and the rhythm, and work out what works best for you.

The following is a sample (although you could make unlimited variations on these themes) of how to go about getting good at Spanish. While there is merit in learning in a chaotic environment (randomly searching for grammatical topics online, pouring over books and other materials, reading whatever you can get your hands on, heading down to the pub for a language exchange with some friends or fellow language-learners etc.), a chaotic approach suits someone who is already motivated and who understands how to study. If you’re completely lost, like a lot of people, it’s best to create a regimented plan and stick to it – at least for a while. No time? Everyone has time. The question is: “are you willing to allocate time to this?” If the answer is “yes”, then your timetable might look something like this:

Making a study plan for Spanish

Ok, that was a joke. Hopefully no one’s timetable looks like that, and that is clearly an exaggeration, but you will probably have to make a couple of sacrifices if your schedule is already pretty busy. Let’s say you want to study five days per week. Each session might be an hour long, so there are five hours in total, not including any lessons you may be taking. This is not supposed to be a minimum or maximum recommendation. Only you will know how you respond to study, although an hour a week is unlikely to be enough. Give yourself a few months of the following (see next blog entry) and watch how good you get (provided you stick with it)!

Next up, a rundown of the actual sessions that you could incorporate into your study plan for Spanish!