My Experience Studying Spanish

I’ve always wanted to learn Spanish. Perhaps my biggest regret outside of being a Longhorn football fan is not taking a gap year before college to live in South America and become fluent. So, when Nicole and I started thinking about how to spend a year off I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to resurrect a dream deferred. As we approach the end of our time in Medellin it seems like the right time to share what I’ve learned while studying this beautiful and challenging language.

(Apologies in advance for the formatting. Somehow LinkedIn's platform is even worse for formatting than MS Word.)

First, I want to be clear about the effort I’ve made so far and the results that effort has yielded. Some facts:

1) Starting point – Square one. I took Latin in high school because I was an idiot. When I took a few Spanish courses in college a billion years ago I did not pay attention because I was still an idiot. Living in Texas it’s hard not to pick up a few words here and there but outside of some vocab I knew nothing.

2) Time Invested - ~300 hours

a) Classroom – 200 hours in group classes

b) Conversation - 40 hours in 1-on-1 conversation practice

c) Individual study – 60 hours memorizing vocab and grammar

d) Immersion – 4 months living in Medellin

3) Money Invested - ~$2,500 for classes and individual lessons

4) Results

a) Conversation - Headline is I can speak Spanish about as well as a not-so-smart 5-year-old right now. I can mostly get through a conversation with someone who speaks slowly and clearly. If I’m talking with a native speaker at their natural speed my eyes glaze over and I start smiling and nodding furiously hoping that will get me through the conversation. ?

b) Reading – I can understand 70-80% of stuff that's written for a general audience. If I know a bit about the context then my understanding is probably closer to 90%.

c) Vocabulary – 2,500 words and counting. For context, native speakers know a minimum of 10,000 words and usually two or three times that many. ?

d) Grammar – I know the 10 most common conjugations but can’t deploy them in real time very easily. I have a decent grasp of other general rules governing things like direct/indirect objects, reflexives etc.?

e) My Accent – Hot garbage.

f) Ability to apologize – I’m the proud owner of a PhD level ability to apologize for being a dumb gringo.

With that out of the way here are some thoughts about my experience studying Spanish:

1) Tailwinds for English speakers wanting to learn Spanish

a) Basics and structure – Spanish may be a romance language while English is not but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a lot in common. The alphabet is nearly identical, punctuation and capitalization rules are the same, and both languages mostly follow the Subject-Verb-Object structure. I cannot imagine what it’s like trying to learn a language like Japanese where none of that is true.

b) Pronunciation – You pronounce every letter in Spanish words which makes pronunciation much easier for beginners. English by comparison is an insane mishmash of pronunciation rules that are impossible to explain. For fun, try to imagine learning how to pronounce O-U-G-H in English words like rough, plough, bought, cough, although, and through…yeah good luck.

c) Cognates – A cognate is a word in one language that shares an origin with a similar word in another language. Cognates are usually spelled similarly and often mean the same thing. Spanish and English share thousands of cognates (e.g., actor-actor, bank-banco, car-carro, education-educacion, family-familia, plant-planta, total-total). These cognates give English speakers a massive head start on vocabulary. Not only that but if you encounter a new Spanish word, you can make an educated guess about its meaning and you’ll be right more often than you’d think.

2) Headwinds for English speakers wanting to learn Spanish

a) The language of language – We all took English classes growing up and can speak fluently but that doesn’t mean we really understand how English is structured or what our brains are doing when we speak. Consider this sentence, “I bought the yellow new beautiful huge house down the street.” If you’re a native English speaker this sentence will sound wrong but you probably don’t know why. Well, it turns out that in English we order adjectives like this: Quantity --> Quality/opinion --> Size --> Age --> Shape --> Color --> Proper adjective (e.g., nationality) --> Purpose. So, the sentence should read, “I bought the beautiful huge new yellow house down the street.” English is full or rules like this that we native speakers have internalized without ever realizing it. I didn’t know what tense, mood, person or gender really meant prior to studying Spanish so I had to learn those things before I could make much progress. Before you can learn a new language you first need to learn the language of language.?

b) The classroom versus the street – Huge shocker here but Spanish in the classroom is different than the Spanish you hear on the street. Native speakers in all languages combine, slur, shorten, and generally abuse all kinds of rules and words when speaking. Nothing wrong with it, that’s just how language works but it does mean the classroom can only get you so far. I’ve just recently transitioned from the classroom to conversational practice and believe I need another 200-300 hours of practice to be confident I could keep up in a conversation with a native speaker.

c) English is everywhere – Lucky for Americans, English is the lingua franca all over the world. A minor downside to this amazing blessing is that we have a crutch available a lot of the time that allows us to “cheat” back to English instead of toughing it out in a foreign language. Even in a place like Medellin where very few locals speak English, I still hear English music, see English signs, and get English menus all the time. Every single foreigner I’ve met at our Spanish school speaks English regardless of their country of origin. On top of that, even if you’re “immersed” and living in a foreign country you’ll get less benefit from that than you might expect when you go home to a spouse or friend who speaks English. For the hardcore folks out there, who are determined to quickly learn a new language here a few tips to get around this challenge:

i) Divorce your spouse and live with a local family that doesn’t speak any English at all ;)

ii) Read, watch movies/shows, and listen to news in the foreign language

iii) Insist on practicing your new language even when locals know English

3) What I’m taking away from my experience studying Spanish

a) A love for Latin America – Prior to this year I’d spent very little time in Latin America and knew embarrassingly little about it. If you’ll allow me to be a bit corny, I have to say that studying Spanish, living in Colombia and visiting Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Panama has deepened my understanding of and appreciation for these incredible places and the amazing people living here. We haven’t left yet but I can’t wait to get back and if anyone wants to throw a few hundred grand my way I’ll buy a condo in Medellin and you can visit whenever you want :)

b) A deeper appreciation for immigrants and international students – Learning a new language is deeply humbling. It’s hard not to feel discouraged after the 10,000th conversation where you couldn’t really get your point across. I feel like communicating in a new language subtracted at least 30 points from my IQ and I didn’t have many to spare. Nobody in their right mind thinks that immigrants and international students have it easy, but this experience has deepened my appreciation for the challenges and frustrations they encounter. Tip of the cap to my classmates at Rice who didn’t grow up speaking English. I honestly have no idea how y’all did it.

c) Reaffirmation that there’s only one way to get to Carnegie Hall – I hate sounding like a boomer but there really is only one way to get good at something – practice. Practice requires time, energy and grit. There isn’t a magic pill to learn Spanish or for any other significant challenge you might undertake. I’m grateful for the time I’ve had in Colombia gutting it out against Spanish because I get to leverage this experience when I encounter new challenges down the road. I plan to continue practicing Spanish and who knows, maybe someday in the distant future I’ll be able to speak Spanish less like a 5 year old and more like a 9 or 10 year old.

Final note is I've got a Spanish 101 doc available for anyone interested. For better or worse there’s still some consultant running through my veins so I couldn’t resist using PowerPoint to summarize the important basics you need to know if you want to learn Spanish. Message me if you want it and I'll send it your way. And don’t worry, I had one of my teachers edit is so it should be reliable :)