Learn to Speak Spanish by Watching Movies
Let’s face it, no matter how many years of Spanish you took in grade school, high school, or even college, most popele never learned a 2nd language just from reading out of a text book. Boring lessons, learning to conjugate verbs, it never really makes sense when you learn it from a book.
There have been great strides over the years in language learning technology and programs. It’s not just all about those old Berlitz classes or tapes. These are the best modern ways to learn Spanish:
Rosetta Stone
The first big advancement was Rosetta Stone. Rosetta Stone was even so popular that the federal government became a big adopter of the program and used it to help its employees learn different languages.
The key behind Rosetta Stone wasn’t about learning the exact translation, but about learning the sounds of each language and developing associations with images and text to teach new words and grammar by spaced repetition without translation.
Rosetta Stone was a game changer.
Duolingo
Then you had other language based apps such as Duolingo. Duolingo focuses on learning conversational phrases without the need for conjugation or translation. After learning conversational phrases, they are connected together so that a person can have a whole conversation in Spanish about a particular subject. While you wouldn’t know all the rules of the language, you would know enough to get by and with practice get a lot better.
TheaterEars
With Rosetta Stone and Duolingo being modern inventions. How did most people learn languages before. Well a lot of them used TV and movies. The would be able to use subtitles so that they could understand what people were saying in their own language at the same time that they heard the TV and movie shows in Spanish.
These days there’s a better way to do that. With the TheaterEars app, you can listen to a movie in Spanish while it is playing in English either at the movie theater or at home. TheaterEars works by syncing to a movie playing in English and then playing the Spanish language track in your earbuds in perfect sync with the movie. What many people do is have one ear listening in English and have the other ear listening in Spanish. By hearing both tracks at the same time, your mind is creating instant associations between the words and phrases, even on a subconscious level. When watching the at home movies available on TheaterEars you can pause, rewind, and fast forward through your movie at home and you can understand each of the lines from the movie in English and Spanish.
Total Immersion
While we all love apps, practice drills, and media, there really isn’t a substitute for total immersion. When learning language you have to put yourself out there. Trying going to a place where only Spanish is spoken. Try speaking only in Spanish for a day, a week, even more. You’ll find that the more that you put yourself in situations where the only option is to speak Spanish, the more that you will learn to speak and understand Spanish. So try going to that local Spanish restaurant and order your food only in Spanish. Tell your waiter how delicious the food was. Find a friend who speaks Spanish and have an entire conversation in Spanish. Try explaining something in Spanish. Get out of your comfort zone. You’ll find that you will learn more than you ever imagined.
