When I first moved to Spain just over two years ago I couldn't speak a word of Spanish. Now, in the area that we are in that wasn't too much of a problem as it is populated with many British, Scandinavian and other non Spanish residence. However, I still felt it was my duty to learn the Spanish language even though many others have been here for many years and never bothered to learn. I bought some books to help me on my way, but after much trying I realised that learning a list of verbs or animals wasn't going to help me in the real world. How often whilst living on the Costa Blanca was I going to need to know that monkey was mono or that frog was rana!
Verbs were an even bigger problem as there are so many different ways of saying the same word. In English the verb generally does not change with the person that is doing the action. So for example, for the verb TO READ we could say
I read a book, I will read a book, they read a book, they will read a book, we read a book, you read a book etc and the verb read would not change. But in Spanish the verb to read changes depending on who is being spoken about and in what tense past, present or future, so read could become leo, lees, leemos, leéis, leen and many other words.
Fortunately I came across a much simpler method of learning to communicate in Spanish after a recommendation. Although this course didn't teach me hundreds of words or tenses it taught me enough of the Spanish language to be able to make myself clearly understood which was very important when going to the doctors or talking to one of my children's school teachers. Most importantly this course also introduced me to a method of remembering new words called Mnemonics.
Mnemonics works by forming a link between a Spanish word and it's English translation and then creating an image in your mind that will make sure you remember it. For example:
The Spanish for I AM GOING TO is VOY A (pronounced BOY AH)
Imagine you are excited about a party and you say,
"BOY A party, I AM GOING TO go for sure."
The Spanish for FROG is RANA.
Imagine you saw a huge 6 foot FROG coming at you so you RAN A way.
Really picture yourself in the situation that you make up for a few seconds and it will become stuck in your head whether you like it or not!
This method works for learning any foreign words, and the crazier the image that you create in your mind the easier it will be to recall it. It's the same as hearing a song on the radio that you may not of heard for many years, yet the instant you hear it you will remember a time that the song was special to you without even thinking about it, maybe you listened to it with your first love, or on a memorable trip somewhere.
You can use this same technique today with any Spanish language course you are currently using, with amazing success. Just make sure the image you create is as goofy as you can make it and years from today that giant frog will still chase you off and make sure you RAN A way!
After struggling to learn Spanish I finally threw out the 450+ page books and started learning Spanish easy. Using just 138 powerful words that could be combined to create over 88,000 natural sounding sentences, I was able to make myself clearly understood in almost any real life conversation. To find out if you could have similar results Click Here for Now Learn Spanish Easy
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