Benny Lewis's Blog, page 69
August 28, 2017
24 Time Hacking Tips from Language Hacker Benny Lewis
I’d like to share some simple shifts you can make in your life so you can manage your time - and have more time available for language learning.
Many of these we’ve shared on Fluent in 3 Months (Fi3M) before - and much of the advice comes from Fi3M founder Benny Lewis. Benny’s aim in creating Fi3M was to share language hacks - faster and smarter ways to learn a language.
In other words, we want to help you learn a new language in less time - or in the small pockets of time you have available through your day.
So, I thought it would be a good idea to have all our best advice on time management in one place.
Before we begin, there’s a quote that’s popular on Pinterest, which I really like. You may have seen it.
“You have the same amount of hours in a day as Beyonce.”
While you can argue that your 24 hours aren’t the same as Beyonce’s - you don’t have assistants, teams, or stylists helping you out - you still have the same 1,440 minutes a day. The key is to make the most of each one of those minutes.
Now, here are the tips from Fi3M’s Benny Lewis on just a few ways you can use the 24 hours you have each day more effectively when it comes to language learning.
Let’s get started!
1. Get Feedback on Your Mistakes
If you want to be sure that you’re actually using the language correctly, talk with a native speaker who can provide feedback. Not only will you learn to use the language more effectively, you’ll get a better ear for it and start to pronounce it more closely to native speech.
From: How Adults Learn: 6 Important Things to Know
2. Create Personalised Vocabulary Lists
Instead of spending countless hours memorizing vocabulary lists from a textbook, I create my own personalized vocabulary list, ensuring that I’ll learn the words that I’ll need to know first.
From: Busted: 6 Common Myths About Polyglots and Language Learners
3. Avoid the “Just Do Something!” Mindset
A very popular way to kill time in language learning is to simply do ‘something’ and feel that it's at least dragging you in the general direction that you need to go. No! Sometimes doing ‘something’ is barely better than doing nothing. Do something worthwhile!
From: Solving specific problems rather than trying to learn everything
4. Focus on Learning What Matters
Trying to become a master of everything at once will not allow you to make progress on anything specific swiftly enough to feel progress, and you can get demotivated.
From: Why hard work isn’t what makes good learners
5. Apply the 80-20 Rule to get 80% of the Results from 20% of the Effort
Successful language learners find ways to use the little they know in the maximum possible ways; this adaptation of Pareto's principle is an absolute must for people focused on speaking well as quickly as possible.
From: The Pareto (80-20) principle in language learning
6. Count Hours, Not Years...
"Now add up your ‘hours’ based on this new system, but actually counting the time you put in and you will see a dramatic difference. ‘Five years’ of two hours of passive listening a day, four hours of grammar studying a week and two hours of actual practise with natives per month would give you about 364 ‘hours’ (based on my weighted units) of genuine work. That's fifteen days worth of work in your ‘five years’.”
From: How to learn a language in hours, not years
7. ...Or Count Minutes, Not Hours
If you’re suffering from guilt or stress about how behind you are on your study hours, then maybe you should stop counting how many hours you’re practising for a few days, and instead see how many more minutes you can squeeze into a day.
From: “I’ll Do It Tomorrow” – Solving 3 Mindtraps that Make You Put Off Language Learning
8. Use the 5 Minute Pockets in Your Day
I highly recommend micro-commitments and zoning out in your target language. Committing for five minutes is a lot easier than committing for thirty minutes, and after five minutes I often find myself thinking “this isn't so bad, just another five minutes”.
From Fi3M Team Member Joseph Lemien, in Learning a New Language: Secrets of Language Learning Pros
9. Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
If you charge into the frustration, embrace it, and fill up all your free time with it, then you WILL get to the other side much quicker.
From: The only way to get far quickly is to get out of your comfort zone
10. Avoid Useless Information
If you removed two hours of social media you’re just – let’s face it – not doing anything terribly productive, just consuming random bits of news and sound bytes, you could literally become a proficient [language learner] in that amount of time.
From: Intensive Language Learning and the Tim Ferriss Experiment
11. Stop Using “I’m Too Busy” as an Excuse
If you sleep eight hours a night, then you have 112 hours a week to play with. If you work full time for 40 hours a week, then there's still 72 hours left over.
From: How I Learned Fluent Italian While Working 60 Hours a Week
12. Can’t Find Time? Make Time!
No matter how busy you are, how much you work or socialise or devote your time to other important projects in your life… you always still have some time left over that you may be currently wasting!
From: How to make time if you are too busy
13. Go Public With Your Language Goals
One of the best ways to encourage progress is to tell others about your objectives. Making your mission public will also make it real. There will be more at stake and you won’t want to fail.
From: 5 Rituals to Help You Learn a Language Faster
14. Remember: There Are No “Perfect Conditions”
What I prefer to do is try to make things as ideal as they can possibly get and then handle problems quickly and swiftly, whenever possible, if they come my way so that I can stay on track.
From: Absolutely perfect learning conditions? An unrealistic pipe dream that holds you back
15. Eliminate “Time Sucks"
We are all very busy, but many of us still achieve great things because we organize the time we have control over much better, and remove things that suck time out of our day, like television.
From: The many reasons (32 so far) why we DON’T succeed in learning languages
16. Keep a To-Do List
What has worked better for me, has been setting up a to-do list of precisely everything that I need to do that day and deciding approximately how much time it will require.
From: 21 ways to work, socialise & sleep well, maintain inbox 0 with 400+ emails, AND intensively learn a language all in a day! Time hacking 2.0
17. Use the Pomodoro Technique
Use the Pomodoro time-hacking method to increase your productive sprints. By alternating 25 minute work sessions with 5 minute rests, you allow your brain to get some breathing room and are able to get in more focused work.
From: The CIA is Wrong: It Doesn’t Take 1,000 Hours to Learn a Language
18. Remove Distractions
If you’re going to sit down for a session of language learning, take a few moments to turn off all the electronic attention-hogs that surround you. Go away from your TV, turn off the wifi on your devices, and close down unnecessary applications or windows.
From: 5 Simple Research Proven Hacks to Stop Wasting Time and Start Learning Fast
19. Stop Comparing
If someone is a smarter language learner than you, has more free time than you or whatever, well good for them I suppose. But who cares when it comes to you and your situation?
From: Questions that waste your time
20. Focus on One Day at a Time
The question should never be “how long does it take one to learn a language” but “how long do you have?” or “How intensively are you willing to invest your time?”
From: How much time does it take to learn a language?
21. Immerse Yourself at Home
An immersion environment is all about finding opportunities to bring the language into your current lifestyle and activities.
From: Language Immersion: How to Create an Immersion Environment on Your Phone
22. Just Start!
What would you be doing right now if you really wanted to learn a new language? The key idea here is RIGHT NOW, and the answer is something. Anything. It really doesn't matter what you do, just start, and start now.
From: How to Start Learning a New Language (Right Now. Today. Seriously).
23. Try “Blending”
Think about what you actually do in your free time and try it entirely through your acquired language! I've played chess in Italian, read computer and men's health magazines in French, taken dance lessons in Spanish, windsurfing lessons in Portuguese, flirted with pretty girls in Esperanto and chatted in MSN and Skype in Irish Gaelic.
From: Combining learning languages with your hobbies
24. Use Mini-Missions
Apart from the actual benefits and doing something practical to reach your “end” goal, there is a great sense of achievement that you can feel every day in reaching your objective.
Will You Make the Time to Learn a Language?
We hope you enjoyed this collection of tips from Benny Lewis on how to learn a language even when you’re busy.
We’d love to know how you find time to study language. Feel free to share your time management strategies in the comments below.
Need a little extra help making time for language learning? We’re really excited to announce our new course on building solid language habits. Learn more about how you can fit language learning into your schedule.
The post 24 Time Hacking Tips from Language Hacker Benny Lewis appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 25, 2017
How to Say “Good Morning” in Spanish (and 88 other Useful Spanish Words and Phrases)
There are lots of good reasons to learn Spanish, and if you want to spend any length of time in regions where Spanish is spoken, here are some really useful Spanish words and phrases that can help you make the most of your visit.
Without further ado:
How to Say "Good Morning" in Spanish
"The morning" in Spanish is la mañana, but if you want to wish someone a good morning you must say buenos días, which literally means 'good days' (note the plural). You'll never hear someone wish you a 'buena mañana' - don't ask me why.
If you’re into Spanish grammar, note that día is one of the rare Spanish words that ends in an '-a' but is masculine, so it's buenos días, not buenas días.
How to Say "Goodnight" in Spanish
Like with buenos días, to wish someone goodnight in Spanish you have to say it in the plural: buenas noches. Similarly, "good evening" is buenas tardes.
In English we generally don't say "goodnight" as a greeting; it's more often used when you or the person you're talking to are about to go to bed. Spanish is not like this - buenas noches can be used as a greeting as well as a farewell, provided it's the right time of day.
So when's the right time of day to use buenas noches? Spanish doesn't really distinguish between the 'afternoon' and the 'evening' in the same way that English does; there's only the tarde, which starts at noon, and the noche, the night. Generally you'd say buenas tardes from midday until sunset, at which point you'd start saying buenas noches.
How to Say "Hello" in Spanish
We've covered "good morning" and "goodnight", but we mustn't forget the most simple Spanish greeting of them all: hola, which means "hello".
Hola, of course, can be said at any time of day, and it's by far the most common way of greeting someone in Spanish.
How to Say "I Love You" in Spanish
Spanish has two main ways of saying "I love you".
The more common one is te quiero, which literally means "I want you", but is used in many of the same ways we'd say "love" in English - e.g. talking to your boyfriend or girlfriend or to your family.
The more literal translation of "love" is amar. Te amo implies much more serious feelings than those conveyed by te quiero. If you're describing non-romantic love, e.g. for a relative, you should stick with 'te quiero'.
How to Say "Happy Birthday" in Spanish
A birthday in Spanish is a cumpleaños, a combination of the words año, meaning "year", and cumplir, which, among many other possible translations, can mean “to turn”, as in "to turn X years old". On your fifth cumpleaños, you cumples cinco años (turn five). And to wish someone a happy birthday, you say feliz cumpleaños.
What about the song ”Happy Birthday”? Naturally, there's a Spanish version that uses the same melody - but different Spanish-speaking countries actually have their own versions of the lyrics. For example, here's the version you're most likely to hear in Spain:
Cumpleaños feliz,
cumpleaños feliz,
te deseamos (name),
cumpleaños feliz.
And there are many more versions.
How to Say "Thank you" in Spanish
To thank someone in Spanish, simply say gracias.
If you're feeling particularly grateful, you can add emphasis with muchas gracias or even muchísimas gracias. The verb 'to thank' can be translated as dar gracias (to give thanks).
How to Say "You're Welcome" in Spanish
In English we have several ways of saying "you're welcome", and Spanish is no different. When you say gracias to somebody, probably the most common response you'll hear is de nada (“it’s nothing”), but you might also hear mucho gusto (“my pleasure”), no hay de qué (“not at all!”), or las que tú tienes.
Despite what TV and movies might have made you believe, "no problem" in Spanish is not no problemo! Problemo isn't even a real Spanish word (it's problema), but even if it was, no problemo still wouldn't work since you can't stick no before a noun like that. If you really want to literally say 'no problem', say no hay problema, sin problemas, or ningún problema.
How to Say "How Are You?" in Spanish
A common way to say "how are you?" in Spanish is ¿qué tal?, which could also be translated as "what's up?" or "how are things?"
An alternative is ¿cómo estás?, or ¿cómo está? - the latter being more formal because it means you're addressing the other person as usted rather than tú.
When someone asks you ¿qué tal? or cómo estás, you can simply reply with bien to let them know you're okay.
How to Say "I Miss You" in Spanish
There are two common ways to say “I miss you” in Spanish: te extraño and te echo de menos. The former is generally more common in Latin America, while the latter is more common in Spain, although either would probably be understood in both places.
How to Say "Yes" in Spanish
"Yes" in Spanish is sí, although Spanish speakers have a tendency to say it over and over again in rapid-fire when they could have just said it once: ¡sísísísísísí!.
Make sure you write sí with the accent when you mean 'yes'. Si without an accent is pronounced the same way, but means "if".
How to Say "Tomorrow" in Spanish
Mañana, mentioned earlier, means both "tomorrow" and "morning". This sounds like it could get confusing, but it's almost always clear from the context which one is meant.
If you want to say "tomorrow morning", don't say mañana mañana! The correct translation is mañana por la mañana (tomorrow in the morning).
How to Say "Why" in Spanish
To ask someone 'why' in Spanish, say ¿por qué? - literally "for what?"
To respond to ¿por qué?, you might need the word porque, which means "because". They look and sound similar, but note that porque is stressed on the first syllable, while ¿por qué? has more stress on the second word. (There's also the noun el porqué, which means "the reason".)
A fun little expression you might find handy is porque sí, which literally means "because yes". Porque sí is something you might say when someone asks you a question with ¿por qué? but you don't want to give a real explanation. It's the equivalent to responding to a "why?" question in English with the single word "because!" - it's a humorous way of answering without actually answering.
Numbers in Spanish
To master numbers in Spanish, first you need to learn how to count to twenty:
0 - cero
1 - uno
2 - dos
3 - tres
4 - cuatro
5 - cinco
6 - seis
7 - siete
8 - ocho
9 - nueve
10 - diez
11 - once
12 - doze
13 - trece
14 - catorce
15 - quince
16 - dieciséis
17 - diecisiete
18 - dieciocho
19 - diecinueve
20 - veinte
(Note that 16-19 are particularly easy to remember because they're simply formed by combining diez, ten, and a smaller number.)
Next you should learn the remaining multiples of ten:
30 - treinta
40 - cuarenta
50 - cincuenta
60 - sesenta
70 - setenta
80 - ochenta
90 - noventa
100 - cien
To fill in the gaps, just observe some examples and the pattern should be obvious:
21 - veintiuno
22 - veintidós
23 - veintitrés
31 - treinta y uno
41 - cuarenta y uno
57 - cincuenta y siete
58 - cincuenta y ocho
59 - cincuenta y nueve
When it comes to really big numbers, note that Spanish uses the long scale naming system, meaning that while a "billion" in English has nine zeroes on the end (which Spanish speakers call simply mil millones, a thousand millions), a billón in Spanish has twelve zeroes (what English speakers call a "trillion").
On the subject of big numbers, in English we often write them with a comma every three digits to aid readability, e.g. "1,000,000", but in Spanish you use a full stop (that’s a “period” for the American readers) for the same purpose: "1.000.000". Similarly, in Spanish you use a comma for the decimal point, so e.g. the number that we write as "1,499.99" would normally be written as "1.499,99" in most Spanish-speaking countries.
Days of the Week in Spanish
The days of the week in Spanish are simply:
Monday - lunes
Tuesday - martes
Wednesday - miércoles
Thursday - jueves
Friday - viernes
Saturday - sábado
Sunday - domingo
Remember that in Spanish, unlike in English, days of the week are not written with a capital letter.
Months in Spanish
January - enero
February - febrero
March - marzo
April - abril
May - mayo
June - junio
July - julio
August - agosto
September - septiembre
October - octubre
November - noviembre
December - diciembre
Like days of the week, month names in Spanish are also not capitalised.
Colours in Spanish
Like English, Spanish has an enormous number of words for different colours, including obscure and fancy words (azure, fuschia) that almost never get used. Here are the most important ones you should know:
blue - azul
yellow - amarillo
red - rojo
orange - anaranjado
white - blanco
black - negro
brown - marrón
green - verde
grey - gris
What other Spanish words or phrases do you think would be useful on a trip to a Spanish-speaking country? Let me know in the comments.
The post How to Say “Good Morning” in Spanish (and 88 other Useful Spanish Words and Phrases) appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 21, 2017
Dead Languages: How (and Why) to Learn a Dead Language
But what if you find yourself looking for a greater connection to history? To a religion or your heritage? Or even a desire to better understand the languages that you currently speak? You’re looking for the type of connection that you just can’t get with a modern language.
Latin, Ancient Greek, Old Viking runes and Egyptian hieroglyphs call to you and you feel it’s time to answer.
These are dead languages - those that no longer have a native speaking community. How do you learn a language without native speakers?
Before we get into how to learn a dead language, or even an extinct language, let’s take a step back talk about what they are.
What is a Dead Language?
Dead languages are often confused with extinct languages, so I think it’s worth spending a moment to differentiate the two.
A dead language is a language that is no longer the native language of a community, even if it is still used in other contexts. Its uses tend to only exist in specific situations - perhaps academia or amongst individuals or in special circumstances - such as the use of Latin in the Vatican City.
In contrast, extinct languages are those that are no longer in current use and that do not have any speakers.
While scholars have tried to draw a clear line between the two, the division is still a little fuzzy. Why? Because both languages underwent the same process and no longer have any native speakers. The difference is that dead languages may still have communities that speak the language.
How Many Dead Languages Are There?
According to various sources, there are thousands of dead languages. Maybe as many as hundreds of thousands. There’s a lot of history on that list.
What caused so many of the languages once spoken around the world to die? Turns out, there are a lot a factors that can lead to the end of a language.
Language death happens as a language is either absorbed into another - usually a minor language into a major - or the last native speaker is lost. This typically happens over a long period of time, but there are exceptions. Sometimes there are radical language deaths where the native speakers stop speaking the language, whether by force or choice.
What are Some Dead Languages?
As I mentioned before, there are thousands of dead or extinct languages that could be included on this list. Here are seven:
Latin
As far as dead languages go, Latin is the most studied. It’s also one of the best known dead languages.This is because it was (and is) taught in schools, because of its importance in the Christian church, and because of its use in legal or political situations.
Latin’s death was caused by the process of language change, meaning it was gradual. Latin became Vulgar Latin which then led to the splitting up of the language into the various Romance languages. The result? Latin fell out of use.
Some of the famous writers in the language include Ovid, Julius Caesar, and Cicero. If you’re interested in learning any of the Latin languages, like Portuguese, French, Spanish, or Romanian, it would be a great asset to you as a learner. Plus, more modern material is now available in the language, so fans of The Hobbit, Harry Potter, Winnie the Pooh, The Adventures of Tintin, Le Petit Prince or even The Cat in the Hat have learning materials to enjoy.
Recommended Latin Resources
Getting Started with Latin by William E. Linney
Wheelock’s Latin
Coptic
Ancient Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, and it was spoken until the late 17th century in the form of Coptic.
If you’re into hieroglyphics or different writing systems, Ancient Egyptian would be a fun language to learn.
Like Latin, Coptic is still used as a language of religion. It’s used by the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria and today, there are several hundred fluent speakers. Many learners use hymns to study the language, but there are a few additional resources available for this interested in learning the language.
Recommended Coptic Resources
Memrise
Introduction to Sahidic Coptic
Mandan
Mandan is a Siouan language that was spoken in North Dakota. It was one of about three languages to die in 2016 with the passing of Dr. Edwin Benson.
The language is currently taught in schools, and there are extensive materials available for the language at the North Dakota Heritage Center. There are two main dialects: Nuptare and Nuetare. The latter fell out of use, and only Nuptare survived into the 20th century.
The Mandan language has some similarities to the Welsh language and at one point, scholars even believed the language to be displaced Welsh. In the 1830s, Prince Maximilian of Wied created a comparison list of Mandan and Welsh words, but the validity of these origins is still debated.
Recommended Mandan Resources
APS Audio Collections
Sanskrit
Sanskrit is an ancient Indian language and the liturgical language of Hinduism. It was the lingua franca of much of the east for more than three thousand years.
If you’re interested in learning languages like Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, or Bengali, among others, Sanskrit could be a big help. It’s essentially the Eastern equivalent of Latin in the West and many languages in the modern world have Sanskrit roots.
Recommended Sanskrit Resources
LearnSanskrit.org
Complete Sanskrit from Teach Yourself
Gothic
The Gothic language is an extinct language that is from the Germanic language family. The Codex Argenteus, a translation of the Bible produced in the 6th century (but copied from a 4th century version), is the most well-known source for Gothic, but the language has a significant body of texts in comparison with other Eastern Germanic languages.
The language began to decline for a variety of reasons during the 6th century including geographic isolation and a defeat by the Franks. By the 9th century, it fell out of use. There may be evidence, however, that it was used until the 18th century but the versions of the language that survived past the 9th century are significantly different. It is argued that they may, in fact, be different languages.
Recommended Gothic Resources
An Introduction to the Gothic Language by William H. Bennett
Grammar of the Gothic Language by Joseph Wright
Old Norse
The North Germanic language, Old Norse, was spoken by Scandinavians between the 9th and 13th centuries. During the 10th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language - it reached from settlements in North America (Vinland) all the way to Volga in present-day Russia.
Modern descendants of the language include Icelandic and Norwegian, so learning Old Norse would give you a leg up if you’re interested in either. It would help with Faroese, Danish and Swedish as well.
Recommended Old Norse Resources
A New Introduction to Old Norse: Grammar
A New Introduction to Old Norse: Reader
Ancient Greek
Ancient Greek, the language of Homer, Aristotle, and Socrates, is a language of intellects (it has been the subject of scholarly studies since the Renaissance). It dominated parts of Europe from the 9th century BCE to 6th century CE.
Many of the words used in scientific fields were taken from Ancient Greek, and tech industries are following suit. If you work in these industries, studying the language would be an interesting way to further explore your field and understand the origins of the terms you use each day.
If you’re interested in learning Ancient Greek, it also would help you with modern languages such as modern Greek or Crimean. As with Latin, texts such as Harry Potter and Asterix are translated into the language.
Recommended Ancient Greek Resources:
Greek: An Intensive Course
Le Petit Prince
Harry Potter
Why You Should Learn a Dead Language
Why should you learn a dead language, or even an extinct language? If you can’t use the language to communicate with other people, is there any point?
Yes, and here are just a few reasons you might benefit from learning a dead language:
Like Esperanto, learning a dead language like Latin or Ancient Greek could help you learn other languages more easily
Learning a dead language gives you a window into history that you just don’t get from modern languages
You still get all of the cognitive benefits you would get from learning any language - modern or not
Academic or professional benefits, meaning you can advance your career
You can read ancient texts the way they were intended to be read - in their original language
Not a lot of people are doing it, so it sets you apart
You gain a greater connection to history and different cultures
How to Learn a Dead Language
Ideally, to learn a language, you’d want a course book to explain the grammar, a dictionary for vocabulary, audio to work with, literature, and speakers to practice with.
Unfortunately, in the cases of most dead languages, these are all things you’d be counted lucky to have. So what happens when resources like this don’t exist for the language? How is the language learned?
Linguists often work to reconstruct languages based on fragments of writing - letters, documents, or records - they come across. They patch these together to estimate what the language sounds like and what the missing pieces might be.
You can see an excellent example of how this is done in Tim Doner’s talk at the 2014 Polyglot Conference.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/FAPQEx3tgDQ
Thankfully, as a learner, you don’t necessarily need to do this.
Today, many of the dead languages that learners are most interested in have grammar or course books readily available. They’re often the result of the work done by those who reconstructed the languages, or by those who got their hands on those reconstructions and primary sources.
When this isn’t the case, there are often archives that include texts originally written in the language. Learners then use the text in the target language and a translation of the same work, using the two to study the language.
For more recent dead languages, audio often exists. A language like Eyak, an Alaskan language, has audio, a dictionary, collections of folktales, and grammar.
The Internet is another incredible resource for those interested in dead languages. Before, finding others who shared your passion for say Old English or Biblical Hebrew was difficult if not impossible. Nowadays, however, a quick Google search changes this.
While dead languages don’t have native speakers, you are still likely to find other learners. Some of these will be better than you at speaking or understanding the dead language you’re learning. As a learner, these people are an invaluable resource.
To practise speaking a dead language, you just need one person, one speaker or fellow learner who is just a little bit better than you. They don’t have to have mastered the language as long as they are a decent speaker. Try to create a structured learning process with them. If they are a teacher, that’s even better. Some teachers can definitely be worth any price. If they are a fellow learner who just wants to help you, it puts a little bit more of the lesson structure preparation on you.
Dead Languages: Conclusion
When you think of dead languages, it’s easy to forget that they were living languages. Much like English, French, Korean or Arabic, people once loved, laughed and experienced life through languages like Hunnic, Rumsen, or Norn. Reading and learning these languages offers you the chance to connect with those who cursed, philosophized or debated in them and grow more deeply connected with history.
And who knows? Perhaps languages that are extinct today may regain a place in modern society. Hebrew was extinct for around two millennia, but a nationalist movement in the 19th century revived the language. Today, there are millions of speakers. Cornish, a language spoken in Cornwall, England, is headed along a similar path.
Now, I’ll turn it over to you. Are you interested in extinct or dead languages?
If you are, what are you doing to learn or connect with them? I’d love to hear from you in the comments!
The post Dead Languages: How (and Why) to Learn a Dead Language appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 18, 2017
10 Must-Try Russian Podcasts and YouTube Channels (and more!) for Russian Learners
It's pretty easy to find good listening resources for popular languages like Spanish, French or German.
But what if you're learning Russian?
Good Russian listening materials might be harder to find than for some other languages, but they do exist!
In this post, I'll go through some of my favourite listening resources for learning Russian. They represent a selection of different kinds of Russian material. You'll notice there's everything from podcasts to YouTube channels to news websites.
Why such a broad list? I wanted to share lots of different resources because we all have different interests and different ways we like to consume content. Improving your Russian listening skills is really difficult, and if you're going to be successful you need to work with materials you enjoy. That's what will keep you coming back to practise day after day. And it's that consistent practice that will ultimately allow you to achieve the level of comprehension you desire.
You'll notice that many of the Russian resources mentioned in this post come with transcriptions of the audio you'll be listening to. While it's always good to train your ear as much as possible not to depend on written text, the transcriptions are an important part of the listening process because they allow you to check your understanding of what you're hearing.
The key is to work with audio and text without becoming overly dependent on the written word. As you become more confident, you'll be able to spend more time practicing conversations or using materials that don't have transcriptions.
So, without further ado, let's look at some of best resources you can use to improve your Russian listening skills ...
1. RussianPod101
Innovative Language podcasts are one of the most popular and well-known listening resources among online language learners. And RussianPod101 is one of the most comprehensive Russian audio resources you'll find.
This podcast features hundreds of episodes covering all levels from absolute beginner right up to advanced.
Each episode features a dialogue about a common aspect of Russian life and culture, followed by a comprehensive breakdown of all of the vocabulary and grammar used in that episode. You'll learn lots of phrases that you can use in real conversations yourself.
There are show notes for each episode complete with transcripts of the conversation in English and Russian, and notes on new vocabulary and grammar points.
Each lesson is usually about 15 minutes long, which is shorter than other audio programs like Pimsleur. Personally, I prefer this length at it means I can easily find 15 minutes to listen to an episode even on the busiest days.
You can sign up for RussianPod101 here.
2. Slow Russian Language Podcast
As beginner, it can be hard to find appropriate listening material. Of course, the ultimate goal is to work with normal native speed audio. But at the very beginning, that’s just not realistic.
That’s why the Slow Russian Language Podcast is perfect for beginner and intermediate learners. Slowed down texts are easier to understand and allow you to get to grips with the language before you start speeding up your listening!
The podcast is presented by a native Russian speaker, Daria, who does a really good job explaining all of the vocabulary and phrases you hear in the audio. She also creates episodes about really interesting topics. One of the things I loved most about the Slow Russian podcast is that it helped me learn something about Russian life and culture as well as about the language. For example, there are episodes on subjects as wide ranging as ‘Daily Life in Moscow’, ‘Do the Baltics really hate Russia?’ and even ‘The Russian Education System’.
3. News in Slow Russian
No matter what language you speak, people love to talk about current affairs. It doesn’t matter what’s in the news - politics, sport, fashion…
News in Slow Russian gives you daily news in small bite sized chunks so you can practice your listening in just a few minutes a day.
What I really love about News in Slow Russian is that it allows you to make listening to Russian a daily habit with short and interesting audio recordings every day.
Do you have 5 minutes on your way to work or during your lunch break? Perfect - you can fit in an episode of News in Slow Russian.
The fact that the episodes are short also makes them easy to repeat, which is an important part of the listening process!
The podcast helps you learn relevant vocabulary that’s likely to come up in real conversations AND it encourages you to practice a little every day.
4. Easy Languages: Russian
Practicing your listening doesn't just have to be about audio, you can use video resources too.
One of best I've found is the Easy Languages channel on YouTube.
What I love about this channel is that it exposes you to real, natural spoken Russian.
Each episode features a single question, which the interviewer asks to people on the streets of Russian cities.
The fact that each video only features a single question allows you to hear multiple answers on the same topic and means you have more context for trying to understand what people are saying.
Plus, the videos are subtitled in English and in Russian so you can easily follow along even if you're only a beginner.
Lastly, most of the episodes are only about 4 or 5 minutes long which means they're short and easy to repeat. You're not going to catch everything the first time you hear it so working with clips that you can easily repeat a few times is a great way to improve your understanding.
5. LingQ
Of all the resources mentioned in this post, LingQ is probably the one I use the most.
LingQ is an application which allows you to learn languages through reading texts and listening to recordings of them. The basic idea is that you can listen to a recording, read the text and look up any new words you don't understand with a single click! The app also tracks which words you know, which words you've looked up before and which words are completely new to you and highlights them in different colours.
Their library of Russian recordings and texts is easily the largest I've come across and they cover quite a variety of different topics. This is the real value of LingQ for me. I don't have to spend hours searching for interesting content that has both audio and text, LingQ does that for me.
The recordings/texts are even organised by level, so you can easily find something that's right for you even if you're just starting out with Russian.
6. Euronews
News and current affairs vocabulary is always useful because these trending topics will inevitably come up in conversation.
Euronews is an ideal place to pick up this vocabulary because the text in each of their news stories is normally a word for word transcription of the audio in the video report. This makes it a goldmine for learners!
The videos are short (normally 2-3 minutes), so they can be easily repeated. And, if you use the site regularly you can follow developing stories over a number of days to repeat vocabulary for specific topics you're interested in.
Euronews is not just a political news site. It also has extensive sections covering sports, lifestyle, travel, science and many other topics so even if news isn't really your thing, you'll probably be able to find some interesting content there.
7. Maria Zdorovetskaya - Easy Russian
Maria Zdorovetskaya’s Easy Russian YouTube channel has a variety of different videos, some ideal for beginners, others which are more suited to intermediate and advanced learners. It's run by Maria, a Russian vlogger living in the USA.
You'll find lots of fun and interesting videos on her channel discussing various aspects of Russian life. Many of these videos have captions in Russian or English which make them ideal for learners, especially those at intermediate and advanced levels looking to get more exposure to fast, natural Russian.
Maria also has many videos specifically created for Russian learners which are spoken in slower Russian and focus on topics related to learning the language, such as pronunciation. These videos are perfect for beginner and lower intermediate learners because they encourage you to start listening to Russian from the beginner and learning through Russian rather than through English.
8. Rhinospike
Rhinospike is a community-based website where language learners and native speakers can record texts for each other.
The website works on a credit system. For every 3 recordings you make for other people, you earn 1 credit which you can then use to have something recorded for you. Alternatively, if you're short on time you can also purchase credits on the site.
Rhinospike is incredibly useful because it allows you to take any text you're interested it and turn it into a listening resource. This could be a blog post, a magazine article, an excerpt from a book or even a wikipedia entry in Russian. Just upload the content you'd like recorded and wait for someone to complete it for you.
Making your learning fun is one of the keys to maintaining consistency when learning a language and Rhinospike ensures you can always create listening content that you'll enjoy working with.
9. TuneIn Russian Radio
Have you ever wished you could just go and spend a few months in Russia to really immerse yourself in the language? Well, much as travel can help you learn a language, it's not a necessary part of achieving fluency.
You can still immerse yourself in the language from home using platforms like TuneIn to listen to Russian radio.
Tunein is completely free and there are hundreds of Russian language channels to choose from.
Of course, listening to radio has it's positives and negatives. There are no transcripts available for live radio so you really have to depend on your ear! This makes radio ideal practice for upper intermediate and advanced learners who want to immerse themselves in the language but it can be quite frustrating for beginner learners.
One of the best things about listening to Russian radio is that it immerses you in the culture of the country as well as in the language. By listening to the radio stations Russians themselves are listening to, you'll learn about modern Russian culture and hear what native Russians think about current topics.
10. Real Conversations
Normally, when we think of conversation the first thing we think of is speaking. But having real conversations is also a fantastic way to practice your listening!
After all, every conversation has two sides. The great advantage of using conversations to work on your listening skills is that you get to practice two elements of the language at once: listening and speaking.
One of the best sites for finding conversation partners is italki. italki is a language marketplace and exchange where you can find tutors to help you with Russian as well as native Russian speakers interested in language exchanges.
The key to getting the most out of your conversations is to ask your teacher or language exchange partner to only speak in Russian.
This challenges you to really listen to what they're saying and take as much meaning as possible from the context. If you rely on English translations all the time, your progress will be slow. But if you keep the conversation in Russian, you'll soon start to get used to the speed and rhythm of the spoken language.
So, there you have some of the best and most interesting resources for practicing your Russian listening skills! Now, it's up to you ...
At the end of the day, it's the time and effort you put into your listening that will determine how much progress you make. The resources you use are important too, but only if you're making the time to use them regularly.
Take the time to try some of these materials, choose the ones you like best and then get started! Through consistent listening practice over time you'll start to adapt to the speed and sound of Russian and you'll see an improvement in your listening comprehension.
What are your favourite Russian listening resources? Have you used any of the materials mentioned in this post? Leave us a comment and let us know!
The post 10 Must-Try Russian Podcasts and YouTube Channels (and more!) for Russian Learners appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 14, 2017
Sentence Structure: How to Build Sentences and Use the Correct Word Order in Your New Language
This is a question me and my team get asked a lot here at Fluent in 3 Months.
No matter which language you're learning, sentence structure is a common stumbling block. Thankfully, there are some general principles that can help you learn sentence structure in any language.
The Old-and-Broken Rules for Learning Sentence Structure
The typical approach to sentence structure is "learn a big long list of boring rules." For example, here are some German sentence structure rules that a teacher might have you memorise:
Basic word order is subject, verb, object, like in English. "I drink water" = Ich trinke Wasser.
When there's a modal verb like "want to", "try to", etc., the other verb gets shunted to the end. "I want to drink water" = Ich will Wasser trinken.
In "subordinate clauses", the verb also gets shunted to end. So "I drink water" is ich trinke Wasser but "I think that I drink water" is ich denke, dass ich Wasser trinke. Note how "trinke" gets moved to the end.
That's just a small sample of how this approach might work in German; the list goes on: What if there are two modal verbs? What if a subordinate clause has modal verbs? What if the modal verbs are in a different tense? What if there are multiple subordinate clauses?
With enough patience, you'll remember all the rules for all of these cases... maybe.
And of course there are different rules for Spanish sentence structure, French sentence structure, Italian sentence structure, and so on. Do you really want to study a new rulebook for every language?
Why Learning Sentence Structure Rules Doesn't Work
There are two problems with sentence structure rules.
First, language is infinite. No matter how many sentence structure rules you learn, there will always be a longer, more complicated sentence that leaves you stumped.
Second, learning rules is boring, inefficient, and, most importantly, unnecessary. You've already learned at least one language without consciously studying the rules of its sentence structure. You might not believe this, but you can do it again.
To understand how, let’s take a more detailed look at how you learned sentence structure in your native language.
In Your Native Language, You Know Sentence Structure by Instinct
You probably can't even explain what all the rules of your native language are, but you know when the rules are being broken, as in this example:
Imagine that a German friend says to you "I went yesterday by train to the city" (This is a common mistake that German speakers make in English, for reasons that we'll see). If you're a native English speaker, that sentence will have set off alarm bells in your head. How do you know there's a mistake?
A linguist could tell you that English sentences typically follow the structure place-manner-time. German uses time-manner-place, which is where your friend's mistake came from. You don't need the technical explanation though. The sentence "I went yesterday by train to the city" just feels wrong, and you know it instantly.
How Your Brain Learns Grammar
The human brain learns grammar through pattern recognition.
Somewhere in your head is a database of "correct" English sentences that you've been building up since infancy. When a new sentence comes in, your brain performs a quick check to see if it "fits" the patterns it's used to. If it does, all good. If not, it triggers an uncomfortable discord. This is the linguistic equivalent of hearing someone sing out of tune.
If you're a native English speaker, this is how you learned English sentence structure as a child. No one ever explained the "place-manner-time" thing to you. You might have never even thought about it until you read this article. Your brain just figured it out by listening to lots and lots of English.
This isn't like learning to do long division. It's programmed deeply into our brains by over 100,000 years of evolution. Humans learns grammar like bats "learn" to navigate by echolocation. It's part of our natural toolkit.
How to Use Your Brain’s Toolkit to Learn Sentence Structure
How can you take advantage of your brain’s programming as an adult?
It's simple: stop focussing on the why of sentence structure, and start focussing on the what.
It's not that you should never study the rules. Rules can still be helpful, but I suggest you leave them till later. Start by listening to and reading your target language as much as possible. Your brain will get to work behind the scenes figuring out the patterns.
The content you're taking in should always be a tiny smidgen outside your current level of understanding. If you understand it all perfectly, there's nothing for you to learn. If you don't understand any of it, you won't learn anything either.
With enough of this input, eventually you'll be able to feel the correct grammar, in the same way you just feel that it's wrong when someone says "I went yesterday to school."
After you're comfortable with this, it's time to go back to the grammar books and consult the rules. This will help cement what you've learned, and clean up any lingering mistakes in your understanding.
In other words, rules are a terrible way to learn a language from scratch. But they are useful to polish up what you already know.
Test Yourself: Learn Sentence Structure by Creating Sentences
Reading and listening are good ways to learn sentence structure, but they're passive activities. You'll learn much faster if you turn it into something active, forcing your brain to create sentences rather than just take them in. A good way to do this is to turn your input into a test.
Whatever grammatical concept you're trying to learn, I recommend you find (or create) a big list of example sentences that illustrate the concept. For example, say you're learning German and you want to remember how the word order works for modal verbs. Find the page in your grammar book that explains this point. If the book is anyway decent, it will give some examples of sentences that contain modal verbs, such as ich will Wasser trinken.
Assimil, Glossika and LingQ are all useful tools here, as these teach through exposure to full sentences rather than through explaining grammar. They're a great place to find example sentences.
Once you’ve got example sentences, I recommend turning them into flashcards using Anki. For each sentence, break it up into chunks and create a “question” flashcard that asks you how to reconstruct the broken sentence with the correct structure. Here’s an example card for the sentence ich will Wasser trinken:
Where does the word “trinken” go in this sentence?
ich will … Wasser …
Then the other side of the card should simply show the full sentence:
ich will Wasser trinken.
(You could also include a picture of someone drinking water, just to hammer the point home.)
Now, your job is to review the flashcards regularly until you can remember the answers to all of your questions. Look at a card, make a guess, flip it over, and see if you got the answer right. If you did, congratulate yourself. If not, try and remember it next time.
With a few different example sentences, it won't take long for the rule to be burned into your head.
If you find that you keep getting it wrong and you don't understand what the problem is, NOW it's a good time to go back to your grammar book and read the technical explanation.
Sentence structure Like Yoda, Do You Have?
Do you have any other tips for learning sentence structure?
Which languages have the trickiest sentence structure for English speakers? Let me know in the comments.
The post Sentence Structure: How to Build Sentences and Use the Correct Word Order in Your New Language appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 11, 2017
The Language Learning Curve: What’s the Best Way for You to Improve Your Language Skills?
Before I share that, here’s how the language learning journey went for me.
After 5 years of learning Spanish at school, I was only able to remember the bizarre phrase “tengo diez peces” (“I have ten fish”).
To be honest, when I started Spanish, I never thought that I would get much further than “buenos días”, so maybe talking about fish was a step forward from that!
As it turned out, I returned to Spanish as an adult in evening classes at university, and then jumped between various self-study courses before moving to Spain for an eight week language course. I experimented with any and all materials available, and (perhaps most importantly) moved into an all-Spanish speaking flat within a month or so. I spent the next two years in Spain, and the year after that in Colombia.
I remember watching Spanish TV on the first night after moving to Spain (Valencia), and wondering if I would ever understand what they were saying. After a few months in Spain, I was able to work my way through a newspaper (El País - probably not the easiest one for learners!), stopping every second word to look something up in the dictionary, taking one hour to get through an article.
With listening, for a while I could only pick out words and phrases. Later, I started to connect the dots - moving from getting the gist of something to understanding subtleties of conversation. I remember the feeling of frustration that everyone passes through when they can understand more than they can say, and then the joy of finally being able to express myself as I wanted to.
Becoming a confident Spanish speaker took me a long time, and it was anything but a linear process. I certainly haven’t finished learning, and I hope I never do.
Fast-forward a few years, and I became curious to understand whether other people’s experiences learning languages were the same as mine.
I run a website for Spanish learners, Spanish Obsessed, with my Colombian partner Lis, and we asked our readers to share their experiences learning Spanish. We created a survey asking for responses around various data points, in the hope of piecing together the typical language learning curve.
We were to delighted to get over 500 responses! Based on these we derived a few interesting insights into how people learn a new language.
Before I get into the data, a quick caveat: This is not a strictly scientific, controlled study. Responses were self-reported, and while the people responding to the survey come from a variety of backgrounds, may not be completely representative of all language learners.
The Language Learning Curve: How Long Do Most People Take to Learn a Language?
We asked people how long they had been learning Spanish, and what level they thought they had reached. Here’s what we found:
Digging deeper into the chart above, we can see:
For the typical language learner, it takes around 18 months to reach the “pre-intermediate” stage, or 25% of the total time they’ll spend studying to reach near-native level. This is the honeymoon phase of language learning, where everything is new, motivation is high, and progress is quick.
Things start to slow down between “pre-intermediate” and “intermediate”. This is where learners move from fumbling their way around some basic phrases to stringing sentences together. It’s also marked by a big increase in comprehension. Around two thirds (66%) of the time spent learning a language is spent here.
Once you make the jump to upper-intermediate, it becomes easier and things speed up. The hardest jump is between pre and upper-intermediate.
Reaching a native level of proficiency takes a long time… Our advanced learners have been studying an average of six years. Initially, I thought this seemed like far too long. However, this is the average, across a large group of learners. They are a mix of people, including casual learners.
How Much Time Per Week do You Need to Learn a New Language?
We also asked participants how long they spent on Spanish each week:
Motivation seems to be at its highest at either end of the language learning spectrum. Beginners are filled with,a hunger for the language. Likewise, the most advanced learners spend a long time each week on their Spanish.
There’s a definite wane in time spent studying once learners get over their initial honeymoon period. Study time drops from nearly six hours to around three hours per week, as learners figure out that they’re in this for the long haul, and the quick early gains start to subside.
High level learners still spend a long time studying Spanish, using a mix of activities, including listening, speaking and reading. This perhaps reflects their consistency and continued motivation. Good things come to those who wait (and work for it!).
What Language Skills are the Easiest to Learn?
Respondents also rated a variety of language skills (such as speaking and reading comprehension) between 1 (easiest) and 5 (most difficult).
Not surprisingly, everything gets easier as learners improve.
Here’s what we found overall:
Grammar is hardest for complete beginners, but quickly becomes one of the easiest skills. It seems that once beginners have an idea of the absolute basics, grammar quickly falls into the background.
Interestingly, speaking skills (both fluency and accuracy) are at their most challenging around the elementary/pre-intermediate levels, while listening comprehension is actually slightly easier. This reflects that feeling that learners go through of understanding more than they are capable of producing. The good news is that this gets easier over time.
Speaking was rated as the hardest skill for all levels, while reading was the easiest. No surprises here!
The 4 Stages of Language Learning
Based on our findings as well as our own experience, we’ve broken down learning a language into four stages.
We’ve included an approximate time-frame for each stage based on our findings, however remember that this is an average and it’s possible to learn a language much faster with the right approach and motivation.
Here’s what you can expect learning a language to native level fluency:
Stage 1: Beginner - Elementary (0 - 6 months)
At this stage, you’re full of enthusiasm for the language. Everything’s new, and you can immediately see how to use phrases and vocabulary that you learn.
You’re in the honeymoon period - you have time and energy to devote to this, and as a result progress is quick as you learn the easy “low hanging fruit” of the language. “Grammar” is a large, scary concept, but you’re not too worried about that for now. Everything’s difficult, but you’re making rapid progress so feel good.
Focus areas for beginners:
Enjoy the quick progress you are making, and use this time to start building a language learning habit.
Understand that you are learning a lot, quickly, but that things will get harder.
Decide now whether or not you want to commit for the long term.
Stage 2: Elementary to Pre-Intermediate (6 months - 1 year)
This is the stage that sorts the wheat from the chaff. Those who took up learning Spanish as a fad are starting to drop off, and you realise that you are in this for the long-haul. You have a choice to make: learning this language is now either a labour of love or a struggle.
You’ll find that your motivation starts to wane, and the time you spend on Spanish nearly halves. Progress slows down as the easy wins available to beginners dry up. Speaking starts to become a major frustration, as you realise how far your tongue is behind your ears. This is one of the hardest points to break past in learning a language.
Focus areas for pre-intermediate language learners:
Motivation and persistence are key here. Although it now seems more of a struggle, if you revisit your initial motivation that will keep you going.
Choose to view this as a labour of love, rather than a struggle.
Understand that this is, in many ways, the hardest point in the language learning curve. Things will only get easier, and you will only get better from this point!
Stage 3: Pre-Intermediate to Intermediate (2 - 3 years)
Good things come to those who persevere! This is the steepest part of the learning curve, but if you are able to make it to intermediate level there’s a good chance you can keep going.
You’ll have a decent enough grasp of grammar and base vocabulary to understand 80% or more of what you hear and read. Speaking skills (both fluency and accuracy) show marked improvements as you reach an intermediate level, and you can start having more in-depth conversations.
Listening is also a lot easier at intermediate level, and you’ll enjoy your interactions a lot more at this stage.
Focus areas for intermediate language learners:
Have as many real conversations with real people as you can.
Increase your input as much as you can - now’s the time when you should look to watch Spanish TV, read the newspaper in Spanish, and change your Facebook to Spanish (if you haven’t already!).
Stage 4: Upper Intermediate and Beyond (3 years +)
After 3 years (or maybe sooner, of course!), you’ll start to break into fluency. Everything becomes easier, and you start to enjoy Spanish and live in it, rather than view it as an object to be studied.
You can have fulfilling conversations with native speakers, you can understand a variety of types of Spanish, and as a result of this spend more time in the language. This has the happy consequence of further improving your Spanish, which becomes a loop: the more you enjoy Spanish, the more time you spend immersed in it, and the better you become.
From this point onwards, it’s up and away!
Focus areas for advanced language learners:
You’ll be finding Spanish really enjoyable now, so make sure that you keep trying to bring Spanish more into your life. The more immersion the better, and you don’t have to go to a Spanish speaking country to do this.
You don’t need to compartmentalise your time into “study time” any more. Look for ways to integrate Spanish into your life, without necessarily having to set aside an hour each day specifically for the purpose
Where are You on the Language Learning Curve?
Where would you put yourself on the language learning curve? How long have you been learning the language?
Do my findings resonate with what you’ve found in your language learning journey?
Let me know in the comments - I’ll spend time getting back to each of your comments, so jump right in!
The post The Language Learning Curve: What’s the Best Way for You to Improve Your Language Skills? appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
The Language Learning Curve: What’s the Best Way for You to Improve Your Language Skills
Before I share that, here’s how the language learning journey went for me.
After 5 years of learning Spanish at school, I was only able to remember the bizarre phrase “tengo diez peces” (“I have ten fish”).
To be honest, when I started Spanish, I honestly never thought that I would get much further than “buenos días”, so maybe talking about fish was a step forward from that!
As it turned out, I returned to Spanish as an adult in evening classes at university, and then jumped between various self-study courses before moving to Spain for an eight week language course. I experimented with any and all materials available, and (perhaps most importantly) moved into an all-Spanish speaking flat within a month or so. I spent the next two years in Spain, and the year after that in Colombia.
I remember watching Spanish TV on the first night after moving to Spain (Valencia), and wondering if I would ever understand what they were saying. After a few months in Spain, I was able to work my way through a newspaper (El País - probably not the easiest one for learners!), stopping every second word to look something up in the dictionary, taking one hour to get through an article.
With listening, for a while I could only pick out words and phrases. Later, I started to connect the dots - moving from getting the gist of something to understanding subtleties of conversation. I remember the feeling of frustration that everyone passes through when they can understand more than they can say, and then the joy of finally being able to express myself as I wanted to.
Becoming a confident Spanish speaker took me a long time, and it was anything but a linear process. I certainly haven’t finished learning, and I hope I never do.
Fast-forward a few years, and I became curious to understand whether other people’s experiences learning languages were the same as mine.
I run a website for Spanish learners, Spanish Obsessed, with my Colombian partner Lis, and we asked our readers to share their experiences learning Spanish. We created a survey asking for responses around various data points, in the hope of piecing together the typical language learning curve.
We were to delighted to get over 500 responses! Based on these we derived a few interesting insights into how people learn a new language.
Before I get into the data, a quick caveat: This is not a strictly scientific, controlled study. Responses were self-reported, and while the people responding to the survey come from a variety of backgrounds, may not be completely representative of all language learners.
The Language Learning Curve: How Long Do Most People Take to Learn a Language?
We asked people how long they had been learning Spanish, and what level they thought they had reached. Here’s what we found:
Digging deeper into the chart above, we can see:
For the typical language learner, it takes around 18 months to reach the “pre-intermediate” stage, or 25% of the total time they’ll spend studying to reach near-native level. This is the honeymoon phase of language learning, where everything is new, motivation is high, and progress is quick.
Things start to slow down between “pre-intermediate” and “intermediate”. This is where learners move from fumbling their way around some basic phrases to stringing sentences together. It’s also marked by a big increase in comprehension. Around two thirds (66%) of the time spent learning a language is spent here.
Once you make the jump to upper-intermediate, it becomes easier and things speed up. The hardest jump is between pre and upper-intermediate.
Reaching a native level of proficiency takes a long time… Our advanced learners have been studying an average of six years. Initially, I thought this seemed like far too long. However, this is the average, across a large group of learners. They are a mix of people, including casual learners.
How Much Time Per Week do You Need to Learn a New Language?
We also asked participants how long they spent on Spanish each week:
Motivation seems to be at its highest at either end of the language learning spectrum. Beginners are filled with,a hunger for the language. Likewise, the most advanced learners spend a long time each week on their Spanish.
There’s a definite wane in time spent studying once learners get over their initial honeymoon period. Study time drops from nearly six hours to around three hours per week, as learners figure out that they’re in this for the long haul, and the quick early gains start to subside.
High level learners still spend a long time studying Spanish, using a mix of activities, including listening, speaking and reading. This perhaps reflects their consistency and continued motivation. Good things come to those who wait (and work for it!).
What Language Skills are the Easiest to Learn?
Respondents also rated a variety of language skills (such as speaking and reading comprehension) between 1 (easiest) and 5 (most difficult).
Not surprisingly, everything gets easier as learners improve.
Here’s what we found overall:
Grammar is hardest for complete beginners, but quickly becomes one of the easiest skills. It seems that once beginners have an idea of the absolute basics, grammar quickly falls into the background.
Interestingly, speaking skills (both fluency and accuracy) are at their most challenging around the elementary/pre-intermediate levels, while listening comprehension is actually slightly easier. This reflects that feeling that learners go through of understanding more than they are capable of producing. The good news is that this gets easier over time.
Speaking was rated as the hardest skill for all levels, while reading was the easiest. No surprises here!
The 4 Stages of Language Learning
Based on our findings as well as our own experience, we’ve broken down learning a language into four stages.
We’ve included an approximate time-frame for each stage based on our findings, however remember that this is an average and it’s possible to learn a language much faster with the right approach and motivation.
Here’s what you can expect learning a language to native level fluency:
Stage 1: Beginner - Elementary (0 - 6 months)
At this stage, you’re full of enthusiasm for the language. Everything’s new, and you can immediately see how to use phrases and vocabulary that you learn.
You’re in the honeymoon period - you have time and energy to devote to this, and as a result progress is quick as you learn the easy “low hanging fruit” of the language. “Grammar” is a large, scary concept, but you’re not too worried about that for now. Everything’s difficult, but you’re making rapid progress so feel good.
Focus areas for beginners:
Enjoy the quick progress you are making, and use this time to start building a language learning habit.
Understand that you are learning a lot, quickly, but that things will get harder.
Decide now whether or not you want to commit for the long term.
Stage 2: Elementary to Pre-Intermediate (6 months - 1 year)
This is the stage that sorts the wheat from the chaff. Those who took up learning Spanish as a fad are starting to drop off, and you realise that you are in this for the long-haul. You have a choice to make: learning this language is now either a labour of love or a struggle.
You’ll find that your motivation starts to wane, and the time you spend on Spanish nearly halves. Progress slows down as the easy wins available to beginners dry up. Speaking starts to become a major frustration, as you realise how far your tongue is behind your ears. This is one of the hardest points to break past in learning a language.
Focus areas for pre-intermediate language learners:
Motivation and persistence are key here. Although it now seems more of a struggle, if you revisit your initial motivation that will keep you going.
Choose to view this as a labour of love, rather than a struggle.
Understand that this is, in many ways, the hardest point in the language learning curve. Things will only get easier, and you will only get better from this point!
Stage 3: Pre-Intermediate to Intermediate (2 - 3 years)
Good things come to those who persevere! This is the steepest part of the learning curve, but if you are able to make it to intermediate level there’s a good chance you can keep going.
You’ll have a decent enough grasp of grammar and base vocabulary to understand 80% or more of what you hear and read. Speaking skills (both fluency and accuracy) show marked improvements as you reach an intermediate level, and you can start having more in-depth conversations.
Listening is also a lot easier at intermediate level, and you’ll enjoy your interactions a lot more at this stage.
Focus areas for intermediate language learners:
Have as many real conversations with real people as you can.
Increase your input as much as you can - now’s the time when you should look to watch Spanish TV, read the newspaper in Spanish, and change your Facebook to Spanish (if you haven’t already!).
Stage 4: Upper Intermediate and Beyond (3 years +)
After 3 years (or maybe sooner, of course!), you’ll start to break into fluency. Everything becomes easier, and you start to enjoy Spanish and live in it, rather than view it as an object to be studied.
You can have fulfilling conversations with native speakers, you can understand a variety of types of Spanish, and as a result of this spend more time in the language. This has the happy consequence of further improving your Spanish, which becomes a loop: the more you enjoy Spanish, the more time you spend immersed in it, and the better you become.
From this point onwards, it’s up and away!
Focus areas for advanced language learners:
You’ll be finding Spanish really enjoyable now, so make sure that you keep trying to bring Spanish more into your life. The more immersion the better, and you don’t have to go to a Spanish speaking country to do this.
You don’t need to compartmentalise your time into “study time” any more. Look for ways to integrate Spanish into your life, without necessarily having to set aside an hour each day specifically for the purpose
Where are You on the Language Learning Curve?
Where would you put yourself on the language learning curve? How long have you been learning the language?
Do my findings resonate with what you’ve found in your language learning journey?
Let me know in the comments - I’ll spend time getting back to each of your comments, so jump right in!
The post The Language Learning Curve: What’s the Best Way for You to Improve Your Language Skills appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 7, 2017
Conversational Spanish: 88+ Spanish Conversation Starters and Questions
Textbooks can be surprisingly unhelpful in this regard. They might teach you useful grammar and vocabulary, but it's often presented in an unnatural, forced way that doesn't reflect how people actually speak in real world, conversational Spanish.
"What are the days of the week?" "What colour is your shirt?" "How many rooms are there in your house?" These questions might be helpful in the classroom, but they're not much use if you want to speak Spanish in the real world.
With that in mind, in this article I'm going to cover some realistic Spanish conversation starters and phrases you can use in a real conversation.
This is a Spanish-focussed follow-up to this previous article about general tips on meeting strangers and starting conversations, and this one with more tips on social and conversational skills.
How to Break the Ice in Spanish
The English idiom "to break the ice" can be translated literally into Spanish: romper el hielo. But how do you do it? What's the perfect line to start a simple Spanish conversation? After decades of trial, error, and dedicated practice, I've settled on some favourites. For example, here's one that usually works well for me:
"Hola, soy Benny." (Hi, I'm Benny.)
I know: revolutionary, isn't it?
If you feel like that one is too advanced for you (perhaps because your name isn't Benny), here's another one you could try:
"Holo, ¿cómo te llamas?" (Hi, what's your name?)
Where do I get these ideas from?
The truth is, it doesn't matter what you say to start a conversation. What matters is how you say it. Most people like to be sociable, and as long as you're not rude or inappropriate, people will probably respond well to you. And if they don't, it’s their issue, not yours. They're probably just having a bad day; don't take it personally. Move on to chat with someone else.
If you’re still stuck, here are some more Spanish conversation starters you could use:
"¿Está desocupada esta silla?" - Is this seat taken?
"¿Sabe qué hora es?" - Do you know what the time is?
"¿Sabe a qué hora cierra este lugar?” - Do you know what time this place closes?
"¿Sabe dónde está el/la [place]?" - Do you know where the [place] is?
"Hola cariño, ¿cuál es tu signo?" - Hey baby, what's your sign? (I'm kidding, don't use this one really.)
Spanish Phrases for “Getting to Know You”
Some people think that so-called "small talk" bores people and should be avoided. On the contrary, small talk has its time and place. I’ll explain why in a second, but first, let’s have a look at some of the typical “small” questions:
¿De dónde eres? - Where are you from?
¿A qué te dedicas? - What do you do for a living?
¿Qué estudias? - What do you study/What's your major? (a common question if you're a student.)
¿Qué te trae por aquí? - What brings you here?
¿Cuánto tiempo llevas aquí? - How long have you been here?
¿Cómo conoces a José? - How do you know José? (You might ask this if e.g. José is the mutual friend who introduced you, or the host of the event you're at.)
¿A quién conoces aquí? - Who do you know here?
¿Con quién estás aquí? - Who are you here with?
¿Vienes seguido por aquí? - Do you come here often?
Note: for simplicity's sake I'm using the tú form of verbs for all the examples in this article. In a formal setting you might want to use usted instead, and in some countries they say vos. Be sure to use the right "you" for your specific situation.
So, what are the benefits of small talk? Firstly, it’s safe and easy. Most people take a while to "open up" and feel comfortable when talking to a stranger, and small talk helps to bridge the gap. Secondly, small talk provides valuable information about who the other person is and how they relate to the situation you’re in - an instinctive priority everyone feels when meeting a new person.
Don’t be afraid to engage in small talk!
Topics for More In-Depth Conversations in Spanish
Small talk only gets boring when you linger on it for too long. Conversation is about exchanging energy, not information, so don't stand there grilling the other person with questions like they're at a job interview. Think of small talk as the launchpad that will get you to a more stimulating topic.
What will that topic be? It's up to you! What are you interested in? Hopefully you and your conversation partner can find some common ground.
Here are some questions that might get the ball rolling, grouped by category:
Spanish Phrases to Discuss Home and Family
¿Tienes hermanos/hijos? - Do you have any siblings/children?
¿Qué edad tienen? - How old are they?
¿Qué hacen tus padres? - What do your parents do?
¿Donde creciste? - Where did you grow up?
¿Ves a menudo a tus abuelos? - Do you see your grandparents often?
¿Eres cercano/a sus padres? - Are you close with your parents?
¿Cómo es tu pueblo natal? - What's your hometown like?
¿Tienes alguna mascota? - Do you have any pets?
¿Qué raza es tu perro/gato? - What breed is your dog/cat? (Interestingly, Spanish uses the same word, raza, for both “race” in the human sense and “breed” as applied to animals).
Spanish Travel Phrases to Start Conversations
¿Te gusta viajar? - Do you like to travel?
¿Cuál es el lugar favorito en que has estado? - What's your favourite place you've been to? (In Spanish you talk about places you’ve been in rather than places you’ve been to.)
¿En qué países has estado? - Which countries have you been to?
¿Has estado en [Roma]? - Have you been to [Rome]?
¿Querrías ir a [Barcelona]? - Would you like to go to [Barcelona]?
Si pudieras viajar a cualquier lugar, ¿dónde viajarías? - If you could travel anywhere, where would you go?
¿Hablas otros idiomas? - Do you speak any other languages?
¿A dónde fuiste la ultima vez de vacaciones? - Where was the last place you went on holiday?
¿Cuándo empezaste a aprender [español]? - When did you start learning [Spanish]?
Spanish Conversation Starters for Work and School
¿Qué te hizo convertirte en [médico]? - Why did you become a [doctor]?
¿Te gusta tu trabajo? - Do you like your job?
¿Qué es lo que más te gusta de tu trabajo? - What do you like the most about your job?
¿Qué es la cosa más difícil sobre tu trabajo? - What's the most difficult thing about your job?
¿Fuiste a la universidad? - Did you go to university?
¿La disfrutaste? - Did you enjoy it?
¿Qué consejo le darías a alguien que quiere convertirse en [programador]? - What advice would you give to someone who wants to become a [programmer]?
¿Si pudieras volver atrás en el tiempo, estudiarías [psicología] de nuevo? - If you could go back in time, would you study [psychology] again?
Spanish Conversation Starters: Food
¿Te gusta cocinar? - Do you like to cook?
¿Cuál es tu comida favorita? - What's your favourite food?
¿Te gusta la comida [italiana]? - Do you like [Italian] food?
¿Puedes recomendarme una buena restaurante cerca de aquí? - Can you recommend me a good restaurant near here?
¿Qué comen en su país? - What do they eat in your country?
Spanish Conversation Starters: Hobbies
¿Qué haces para divertirte? - What do you like to do for fun?
¿Te gusta [leer]? - Do you like to [read]?
¿Cuál tipo de música te gusta más? - What's your favourite type of music?
¿Cuál es tu [película/libro/banda] favorita? - What's your favourite [film/book/band]?
¿Tocas un instrumento? - Do you play an instrument?
¿Cuál es la peor película que has visto? - What's the worst film you've seen?
¿Practicas algún deporte? - Do you play a sport?
¿De qué equipo eres? - What team do you support?
Deeper Conversations in Spanish: Tell Me More!
Once you've learned a little bit about the other person, how can you expand the discussion on the current topic? As well as offering your own insights and opinions, you can drill deeper and find out more of the other person's. People do love to talk about themselves, after all.
¿Estás de acuerdo? - Do you agree?
¿Qué piensas tú sobre [X]? - What do you think about [X]?
Háblame/Cuéntame más de [X] - Tell me more about [X].
Si no te importa que te pregunte... - If you don't mind me asking...
Alguien me dijo que... - Someone told me that...
Escuché que... - I heard that...
¿Estás de acuerdo en que...? - Would you agree that... ?
Changing the Subject in Spanish
What if the well runs dry? Fear not. In any long conversation, the topic will naturally change over time. Once again, it's the energy that matters, not the information being shared. Unless the other person has something that they're absolutely desperate to say on the current subject, they won't mind (or perhaps even notice) if you make a smooth transition to something else.
Eso me recuerda... - That reminds me...
Hablando de eso... - Speaking of which...
Por otra parte... - On another note...
Estoy cambiando de tema, pero... - I'm changing the subject, but...
Me preguntaba... - I was wondering...
Te voy a decir una cosa... - Let me tell you something
How to Sound Natural When You Speak Spanish
You might be able to have a conversation, but are you conversational? If you’re a native English speaker, you no doubt pepper your English with, like, y’know, little expressions and turns of phrase (and stuff like that) that kinda make you sound more natural, know what I mean? Y’see, every language has stuff like this, but it’s not really taught in textbooks.
These little verbal sprinkles are a big part of the difference between speaking naturally and merely speaking correctly. Here are a few you can use in Spanish:
¡Por supuesto! or ¡Claro que si! - Of course!
¿En serio? - Really? / Seriously?
¡Oye! - Hey! (literally, "listen!")
¡Hostia! - Damn! (This mildly rude exclamation is very common in Spain, but not so much in Latin America.)
¡Ostras! - A family-friendly version of “¡hostia!”. It literally means “oysters!”
¡Dios mio! - Oh my god!
A ver… - Let’s see…
¡No me digas! - No way! (Literally: don’t tell me!)
¡Vale! - Okay! (Used in Spain, "dale" is more common in the Americas.)
Qué yo sepa - As far as I know.
Digo… - Literally “I say”, but you can use this to correct yourself after you misspeak. “Somos dos... digo, tres personas.”
O sea - I mean.../Or rather….
¿Sabes? = You know?
Una pregunta... - Literally “a question”. It’s very common in Spanish to preface a question with “una pregunta”, the same way you might say "Let me ask you something" in English.
If you want someone to repeat themselves in Spanish, a normal, polite thing to say is "¿Cómo?", like saying "sorry?" in English.
Also note that if you're texting someone in Spanish, laughter is written as "jajajaja", not "hahahaha"!
In casual English you might address someone as "dude", "buddy", "mate", "man", and many other alternatives depending on your dialect. Spanish has many such words. In Spain it's very common to call people tío/tía (uncle/aunt). In Colombia, men might address each other as guevón, and in México there are many words, like mano or morro. It varies massively from country to country, so be sure to find out what your local equivalent of these words is!
The word bueno literally means "good", but it's commonly used in Spanish as a filler word, in the same you might start a sentence with "well..." in English. Likewise with pues (“well” in English).
Go Forth and Converse!
I hope you find the above Spanish examples helpful. They’re just the beginning - keep practising your Spanish skills, and you’ll find that your general conversational skills should develop alongside them. In my experience, Spanish speakers tend to be a friendly bunch, so what have you got to be afraid of?
Did I miss anything here? Do you have other examples of useful Spanish conversation starters and tips? Let me know in the comments.
The post Conversational Spanish: 88+ Spanish Conversation Starters and Questions appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
August 4, 2017
How to Improve Your Spanish Accent: A Spanish Pronunciation Guide for Native English Speakers
That’s the “holy grail” of language learning, after all.
Yet people can spend decades living in a foreign country and speaking the local language without ever completely losing the twang of their native tongue.
Clearly, a convincing accent isn't something that just comes automatically once you've spent enough time speaking - it has to be worked on deliberately.
Some people think that it's impossible to speak a language like a native if you start too late in life. This clearly isn’t true, and if you don’t believe me, look at Netflix. Many actors manage to learn a second language (or at least recite foreign lines from a script) with an impeccable accent because their jobs require them to. And I’ve met many people who fooled me with an excellent English accent despite not being a native speaker. It’s difficult, but it's not impossible.
I don’t claim to speak Spanish perfectly, but in this article I'm going to explore some of the most common mistakes we English speakers make. The full intricacies of a native-like Spanish accent are beyond the scope of one article (and of course they depend on exactly which dialect of Spanish you want to learn), but there are a few key points which English speakers typically get wrong and which cause 90% of our pronunciation errors. Focus on these tips if you want to sound less like a gringo or guiri.
(And by the way, if you're a Spanish speaker who wants to speak English more convincingly, the points below should help you too. Just think of this as a list of what not to do instead of what to do. The mistakes that gringos make in Spanish are the same non-mistakes you should be making in English.)
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 1: Roll (or Tap) Your R’s
Everyone knows about the 'rolled R' sound, but not everyone knows how to create it. It can be tricky, and it takes practice, but if you want to sound even remotely convincing as a Spanish speaker, you absolutely MUST learn how to pronounce this letter. There's no way around it.
If you don’t understand how to roll your R and worry you might never be able, I feel your pain. When I had Spanish lessons as a teenager, I had no idea how to produce this sound. My teacher’s explanations were useless, and eventually I gave up trying. When I started learning Spanish again, years later, I had to practice every day for weeks before I finally managed to wrap my mouth around the rolled R sounds. Believe me when I say that it’s possible to learn!
Benny has written about the rolled R before, and I won't repeat him too much here, except to note a few key points:
First, there are actually two different but similar 'R' sounds in Spanish.
The first, and easiest, is the 'tapped' sound that's written with a single 'r', and is pronounced somewhat similarly to how an American would pronounce the 'tt' in 'butter'.
The second, written with a double 'rr' (or a single 'r' if it's at the beginning of a word, like rojo), is the trilled sound that typically comes to mind when we thinking of 'rolling' an 'R' sound. The difference between these two sounds is the difference between the words pero (but) and perro (dog).
The good news is that the tapped R, which most people find easier to pronounce, is much more common than the trilled version.
Second, and more importantly, you have to understand that the Spanish R, whether trilled or tapped, is absolutely nothing like the English R sound. It may be written with the same symbol, but that’s where the similarity ends. When learning to tap or trill your R’s, forget everything you know about the sound in English that uses the same letter. There's basically no relation between them.
The English 'R' sound (technically the 'postalveolar approximant') doesn't exist at all in Spanish, so you need to make sure you never make it. In fact this sound is not just foreign to Spanish, but very distinctively English, and a dead giveaway that you're from an English-speaking country.
In fact, as your accent improves you might find that people can tell that you're not a native, but can't tell where you're from. This will NEVER happen if you pronounce your R's the English way!
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 2: Don't Diphthongise your O and E
Many Spanish pronunciation guides make this mistake: they tell you that the Spanish 'o' is pronounced like the vowel in the English words 'go' or 'toe', and the Spanish 'e' is pronounced like the vowel in the English 'way' or 'say'.
Yuck! This is terrible advice. O and E aren't pronounced like this! It's just that these are the closest English sounds to the correct Spanish ones - but you'd better not pronounce them in the English way, or you might as well be walking around with a giant sign that says hablante de inglés stapled to your chest.
To illustrate the difference, say the English 'o' and 'ay' sounds (as in in 'go' and 'way') out loud, slowly. You'll notice that your tongue and lips actually move throughout the course of each vowel. That's because both of these sounds are actually 'diphthongs', which means "two vowel sounds said quickly one after the other".
If they were single vowels ("monophthongs"), you'd be able to continue making the unchanged sound for as long as you like (until you run out of breath) without moving your tongue or lips at all. Examples of monophthongs in English would be the 'ee' in 'bee' or the 'a' in 'bat'.
You may have guessed where I'm heading with this: the Spanish O and E are simple monophthongs, meaning that your tongue and lips mustn't move at all when you say them. (Spanish diphthongs are always written explicitly with two vowels, such as in león or puerto.) The problem, once again, is that our habits as English speakers get in the way, and we tend to replace the simple Spanish 'o' and 'e' with the doubled-up 'oh' and 'ay' sounds of English. The 'ay' sound, in fact, is actually closer to the Spanish 'ei/ey' as in ley or leído than it is to the single Spanish 'e'.
As an aside, this is a great example of just how crazy English spelling can be. The English 'oh' and 'ay' sounds can be written a ridiculous number of ways: go, toe, though, sew, tow, beau, day, paid, neigh, buffet, alien, prey, brae, and I'm probably missing a few. It's tough enough for native speakers; I'm sorry for foreigners who have to learn all of this the hard way.
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 3: 'Soften' your T’s and D’s
Another common pointer you’ll read in a guide to Spanish pronunciation is that the T and D sounds are 'softer' or 'lighter' than their English equivalents. That's great, but what does this actually mean?
It's pretty simple actually. First, say 'T' and 'D' out loud in your regular English way, and notice that for both sounds, your tongue touches your upper gums just behind the teeth. The Spanish 'T' and 'D' are pronounced with a subtle difference: your tongue should be slightly further forward in your mouth, touching or almost touching your upper teeth.
Can't hear the difference? I assure you, a native Spanish speaker can, much like you can hear the difference between 'bit' and 'beat' but a Spanish (or Italian, or French, or Portuguese) person might not be able to. And as your Spanish improves you'll start hearing the difference more clearly.
Of all the common mistakes in this article, this one is probably the easiest to correct. And also note that, if you pronounce your T’s or D’s the English way, it makes it almost impossible to pronounce the combined 'tr' or 'dr' sounds as in padre, trago, quadro... so you have an extra incentive to get this one right.
Also note that many Spanish dialects tend to 'soften' their D’s so much that they get dropped altogether when they're between two vowels, so a word like encontrado would actually be pronounced ”encontrao”. This is very common in the south of Spain, for instance.
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 4: Shift Your Emphasis from Consonants to Vowels
How do you say "Canada"? It has three 'a's in it - shouldn't they all be the same? Not quite: any native English speaker would say 'CAH-nuh-duh', only bothering to fully articulate the 'A' in the first, emphasised syllable. For the remaining two 'A's, we relax our mouths and just grunt out a neutral 'uh' sound, technically known as schwa.
This has nothing to do with dialect or formality; it's just the lazy way we do vowels in English. Not even the Queen of England would say 'CAH-nah-dah'. But the King of Spain would.
While Spanish words still have stressed and unstressed syllables - and it's important you get the stress right - you need to pay a lot more attention to the individual vowels than you would in English. An A is an A, an E is an E, etc., and you've got to pronounce them properly every time they're written. Cánada, not Cah-nuh-duh. Barcelona, not Barcelon-uh. This is a very common tendency of English speakers, and it's totally wrong in Spanish.
More generally, in English we tend to place more emphasis on the consonant sounds in a word than we do on the vowels. Take the word 'considerable', which translates in Spanish to... considerable, although (as I hope you've figured out by now) it's not pronounced the same. In English when we say this word we're happy to mash the syllables together with no emphasis on the vowels: "kun-SID-ruh-bull'. Sometimes we even miss out syllables altogether, like in the word "probably", which is often pronounced as "probly” or just “prolly".
In a sense Spanish is the inverse of English, in that if you want to sound natural you need to place less emphasis on the consonants and more on the vowels. Considerable is pronounced something like 'kon-seed-eh-RAH-bleh', and each syllable needs to be articulated clearly, especially the vowel sound. If you want to talk in a relaxed, colloquial manner, the consonants get dropped before the vowels do - you need to make sure that each individual vowel sound (considerable) shines through.
It takes some getting used to, but if you can't figure it out, just spend more time listening to native speakers and paying attention to which sounds they do and don't emphasise.
The above is by no means a complete guide to perfect Spanish pronunciation, but it's a start. The above four points are by far the most common issues for English speakers, and are very much worth focusing on as you strive to improve your accent.
And the inevitable side effect of learning the pronunciation lessons here is that when you hear other native English speakers trying to speak Spanish, you'll realise that most of them make all of the above mistakes all the time, and their accents will make you cringe! Maybe you could send them a link to this article?
The post How to Improve Your Spanish Accent: A Spanish Pronunciation Guide for Native English Speakers appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
How to Reduce Your Spanish Accent: A Spanish Pronunciation Guide for Native English Speakers
That’s the “holy grail” of language learning, after all.
Yet people can spend decades living in a foreign country and speaking the local language without ever completely losing the twang of their native tongue.
Clearly, a convincing accent isn't something that just comes automatically once you've spent enough time speaking - it has to be worked on deliberately.
Some people think that it's impossible to speak a language like a native if you start too late in life. This clearly isn’t true, and if you don’t believe me, look at Netflix. Many actors manage to learn a second language (or at least recite foreign lines from a script) with an impeccable accent because their jobs require them to. And I’ve met many people who fooled me with an excellent English accent despite not being a native speaker. It’s difficult, but it's not impossible.
I don’t claim to speak Spanish perfectly, but in this article I'm going to explore some of the most common mistakes we English speakers make. The full intricacies of a native-like Spanish accent are beyond the scope of one article (and of course they depend on exactly which dialect of Spanish you want to learn), but there are a few key points which English speakers typically get wrong and which cause 90% of our pronunciation errors. Focus on these tips if you want to sound less like a gringo or guiri.
(And by the way, if you're a Spanish speaker who wants to speak English more convincingly, the points below should help you too. Just think of this as a list of what not to do instead of what to do. The mistakes that gringos make in Spanish are the same non-mistakes you should be making in English.)
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 1: Roll (or Tap) Your R’s
Everyone knows about the 'rolled R' sound, but not everyone knows how to create it. It can be tricky, and it takes practice, but if you want to sound even remotely convincing as a Spanish speaker, you absolutely MUST learn how to pronounce this letter. There's no way around it.
If you don’t understand how to roll your R and worry you might never be able, I feel your pain. When I had Spanish lessons as a teenager, I had no idea how to produce this sound. My teacher’s explanations were useless, and eventually I gave up trying. When I started learning Spanish again, years later, I had to practice every day for weeks before I finally managed to wrap my mouth around the rolled R sounds. Believe me when I say that it’s possible to learn!
Benny has written about the rolled R before, and I won't repeat him too much here, except to note a few key points:
First, there are actually two different but similar 'R' sounds in Spanish.
The first, and easiest, is the 'tapped' sound that's written with a single 'r', and is pronounced somewhat similarly to how an American would pronounce the 'tt' in 'butter'.
The second, written with a double 'rr' (or a single 'r' if it's at the beginning of a word, like rojo), is the trilled sound that typically comes to mind when we thinking of 'rolling' an 'R' sound. The difference between these two sounds is the difference between the words pero (but) and perro (dog).
The good news is that the tapped R, which most people find easier to pronounce, is much more common than the trilled version.
Second, and more importantly, you have to understand that the Spanish R, whether trilled or tapped, is absolutely nothing like the English R sound. It may be written with the same symbol, but that’s where the similarity ends. When learning to tap or trill your R’s, forget everything you know about the sound in English that uses the same letter. There's basically no relation between them.
The English 'R' sound (technically the 'postalveolar approximant' doesn't exist at all in Spanish, so you need to make sure you never make it. In fact this sound is not just foreign to Spanish, but very distinctively English, and a dead giveaway that you're from an English-speaking country.
In fact, as your accent improves you might find that people can tell that you're not a native, but can't tell where you're from. This will NEVER happen if you pronounce your R's the English way!
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 2: Don't Diphthongise your O and E
Many Spanish pronunciation guides make this mistake: they tell you that the Spanish 'o' is pronounced like the vowel in the English words 'go' or 'toe', and the Spanish 'e' is pronounced like the vowel in the English 'way' or 'say'.
Yuck! This is terrible advice. O and E aren't pronounced like this! It's just that these are the closest English sounds to the correct Spanish ones - but you'd better not pronounce them in the English way, or you might as well be walking around with a giant sign that says hablante de inglés stapled to your chest.
To illustrate the difference, say the English 'o' and 'ay' sounds (as in in 'go' and 'way') out loud, slowly. You'll notice that your tongue and lips actually move throughout the course of each vowel. That's because both of these sounds are actually 'diphthongs', which means "two vowel sounds said quickly one after the other".
If they were single vowels ("monophthongs"), you'd be able to continue making the unchanged sound for as long as you like (until you run out of breath) without moving your tongue or lips at all. Examples of monophthongs in English would be the 'ee' in 'bee' or the 'a' in 'bat'.
You may have guessed where I'm heading with this: the Spanish O and E are simple monophthongs, meaning that your tongue and lips mustn't move at all when you say them. (Spanish diphthongs are always written explicitly with two vowels, such as in león or puerto.) The problem, once again, is that our habits as English speakers get in the way, and we tend to replace the simple Spanish 'o' and 'e' with the doubled-up 'oh' and 'ay' sounds of English. The 'ay' sound, in fact, is actually closer to the Spanish 'ei/ey' as in ley or leído than it is to the single Spanish 'e'.
As an aside, this is a great example of just how crazy English spelling can be. The English 'oh' and 'ay' sounds can be written a ridiculous number of ways: go, toe, though, sew, tow, beau, day, paid, neigh, buffet, alien, prey, brae, and I'm probably missing a few. It's tough enough for native speakers; I'm sorry for foreigners who have to learn all of this the hard way.
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 3: 'Soften' your T’s and D’s
Another common pointer you’ll read in a guide to Spanish pronunciation is that the T and D sounds are 'softer' or 'lighter' than their English equivalents. That's great, but what does this actually mean?
It's pretty simple actually. First, say 'T' and 'D' out loud in your regular English way, and notice that for both sounds, your tongue touches your upper gums just behind the teeth. The Spanish 'T' and 'D' are pronounced with a subtle difference: your tongue should be slightly further forward in your mouth, touching or almost touching your upper teeth.
Can't hear the difference? I assure you, a native Spanish speaker can, much like you can hear the difference between 'bit' and 'beat' but a Spanish (or Italian, or French, or Portuguese) person might not be able to. And as your Spanish improves you'll start hearing the difference more clearly.
Of all the common mistakes in this article, this one is probably the easiest to correct. And also note that, if you pronounce your T’s or D’s the English way, it makes it almost impossible to pronounce the combined 'tr' or 'dr' sounds as in padre, trago, quadro... so you have an extra incentive to get this one right.
Also note that many Spanish dialects tend to 'soften' their D’s so much that they get dropped altogether when they're between two vowels, so a word like encontrado would actually be pronounced ”encontrao”. This is very common in the south of Spain, for instance.
Spanish Pronunciation Tip 4: Shift Your Emphasis from Consonants to Vowels
How do you say "Canada"? It has three 'a's in it - shouldn't they all be the same? Not quite: any native English speaker would say 'CAH-nuh-duh', only bothering to fully articulate the 'A' in the first, emphasised syllable. For the remaining two 'A's, we relax our mouths and just grunt out a neutral 'uh' sound, technically known as schwa.
This has nothing to do with dialect or formality; it's just the lazy way we do vowels in English. Not even the Queen of England would say 'CAH-nah-dah'. But the King of Spain would.
While Spanish words still have stressed and unstressed syllables - and it's important you get the stress right - you need to pay a lot more attention to the individual vowels than you would in English. An A is an A, an E is an E, etc., and you've got to pronounce them properly every time they're written. Cánada, not Cah-nuh-duh. Barcelona, not Barcelon-uh. This is a very common tendency of English speakers, and it's totally wrong in Spanish.
More generally, in English we tend to place more emphasis on the consonant sounds in a word than we do on the vowels. Take the word 'considerable', which translates in Spanish to... considerable, although (as I hope you've figured out by now) it's not pronounced the same. In English when we say this word we're happy to mash the syllables together with no emphasis on the vowels: "kun-SID-ruh-bull'. Sometimes we even miss out syllables altogether, like in the word "probably", which is often pronounced as "probly” or just “prolly".
In a sense Spanish is the inverse of English, in that if you want to sound natural you need to place less emphasis on the consonants and more on the vowels. Considerable is pronounced something like 'kon-seed-eh-RAH-bleh', and each syllable needs to be articulated clearly, especially the vowel sound. If you want to talk in a relaxed, colloquial manner, the consonants get dropped before the vowels do - you need to make sure that each individual vowel sound (considerable) shines through.
It takes some getting used to, but if you can't figure it out, just spend more time listening to native speakers and paying attention to which sounds they do and don't emphasise.
The above is by no means a complete guide to perfect Spanish pronunciation, but it's a start. The above four points are by far the most common issues for English speakers, and are very much worth focusing on as you strive to improve your accent.
And the inevitable side effect of learning the pronunciation lessons here is that when you hear other native English speakers trying to speak Spanish, you'll realise that most of them make all of the above mistakes all the time, and their accents will make you cringe! Maybe you could send them a link to this article?
The post How to Reduce Your Spanish Accent: A Spanish Pronunciation Guide for Native English Speakers appeared first on Fluent in 3 months - Language Hacking and Travel Tips.
