Transcription
Hey everybody, Curup Paul here. Welcome to the channel.
In today's video, I'm going to be talking about strategy. What I think the best strategy is, the most effective strategy to learn Spanish. Now, there are a lot of schools of thought out there. Um, you know, some folks just stick to the apps like Dolingo. I know Comprehensible Input is very popular right now, like Dreaming Spanish, ALG. If you don't know what that is, basically what you're doing is you're delaying speaking and you're just listening to the language. You're not focusing on grammar, anything else. You're just, you know, taking it all in. Learning like you learned as a baby.
I don't know whether to start this like talking about those strategies or what I think's best. Let me just address those two things. Let's start with comprehensible input. I think 100% you need comprehensible input to learn Spanish. But it is only one component, you know, one tool, one part of the strategy. It's not a standalone strategy.
Now lately I've been on YouTube watching videos um from people who've been like you know hey I'm on my 800 hours of say Dreaming Spanish 1,200 hours of Dreaming Spanish or ALG taking it all in and I'm not super impressed with the results. That's a lot of time to spend doing something. And most of them are like, "Hey, I'm understanding a lot." Well, I don't hear them saying a lot. And the point of learning a language is to be able to communicate. And apparently that comes at some point. But if you're relying solely on that strategy, I mean, that's a long journey.
Personally, um I've never thought that was an effective way to learn a language. You see, once I learned Spanish, and I'm going to talk about the strategy, how I did that. Um it's coming up, don't worry. But once I learned Spanish, I would go and translate routinely at, you know, people's homes, people who had been in the United States for years, decades in some cases, and could not speak English. Do you think they've had more than 1,200 hours of comprehensible input? Of course, never picked up the language.
On the flip side, when I retired from being a deputy, I moved to Mexico with my wife and uh we met a lot of other Americans and some Canadians, you know, that moved down there and retire, many of whom have been down there for years, decades in some cases, cannot speak Spanish. Have they, you know, had comprehensible input? Yes, all the time. I just don't think that's enough.
Now, as far as those those apps like Dualingo and things, um, geez, what can I say about those? They're a great introduction to Spanish. They're fun. They'll introduce you to some things. You're just not going to learn Spanish if you just solely rely on Dualingo. I'm just going to say it. And it's not just Duolingo that I'm attacking. I'm just talking about those apps where you're like, you know, you're guessing. It's a lot of guessing games and matching and sliding things and you're getting hey scores and so many days, you know, hey, you have 300 days of Duolingo and I'm like, hey, can you say um I have to wash the car before it rains? And you're like, nope.
What actually I think works because it worked for me is a strategy that consists of three components. I'll start with that. Three components. One of them is to focus on deliberate learning. That's where you're going to learn vocabulary. That's where you're going to learn grammar. That's where you're going to learn patterns in the language. And patterns is the fastest way. Because if I just say vocabulary and grammar, you can get lost. Okay? There is a logical way to learn Spanish through these patterns. I'm going to talk more about it when I get to that component.
Next component is going to be exposure to the language. When I say exposure, it's going to be reading the language. It's going to be listening to the language, but not like um comprehensible input. With comprehensible input, you're not looking up words, my understanding, or at least the ALG aspect of it, and I might be wrong. It's you just trying to understand from context. That's not what you're going to be doing. You're going to be exposing yourself to the language and yes, you're going to be looking up words and yes, you're going to be building your word list because I want you to understand and it's not going to be easy at first, but it's going to get easier as you push yourself. You're pushing yourself through the exposure.
And our last element is going to be having conversations, practicing conversations. So, those are our three components. So, let's say you're an absolute beginner in Spanish. What percentage of time are you going to be spending on these? Okay? And then I'll talk more about them. Let's start our first one, right? Our patterns. That's what we'll call that one, patterns. Okay, deliberate learning. 50% of your time should be deliberate learning, focusing on patterns, grammar, vocabulary, etc. 50%. And I know this goes against the whole dreaming Spanish comprehensible input thing where you're just absorbing. But this is a much much faster way to learn the Spanish language as an English speaker.
You see, you already have a language, right? you're bringing something to the table and you have logic, right? So, no matter what new language I show you, you're going to compare it to English. And fortunately, there's a lot of similarities between English and Spanish, which is going to make it easier. And the things that are different, um, the key there is to just learn them as a little mini pattern so you don't have to overthink it and you can just plug it in to your sentence.
Now, I don't want this whole video to turn into a bunch of examples about what patterns are. I have a video dedicated to it. It's 18 minutes long. I go into a lot of detail and I show you what I mean by patterns and how you can take patterns and put them together to create sentences you may never have seen or heard before in Spanish, but they will be correct. Okay? I promise you. I'll put a link to that video in the description section of this one. You can watch it later.
And I know some folks are like, "Well, I still want to know about patterns, Paul." Um, I'm going to give you something really simple just to just to demonstrate. Let's say you've never taken Spanish in your life. Um, one of the first words that I teach anybody learning Spanish is this one, I. Okay, just like your I, except we kind of stretch a little more in English. I, this one's a little shorter. I And it means there is or there are or as a question is there. Are there?
Now, I like to break Spanish down into little formulas because it's very easy for us, you know, as English speakers using our logic to apply this, okay? And to remember it. So, this one is going to be I plus a noun. You know, any Spanish noun you want to plug in. We never change I. Okay? If we're speaking the present tense, it doesn't matter if it's singular or plural. That's why this is such a great word. So, let's say we take a word. I'm going to use um let's use coffee, right? Cafe. This is cafe. And I want to say um there's coffee. How do you think I would do that? I've just shown you the formula. I've shown you this word and there's I. What do you got? I cafe. There's coffee.
Now, to make these questions, all we do is change our voice inflection. And if we're writing it, we would put an upside down question mark at the beginning, a regular question mark at the end, but it all stays the same. So, if I want to ask, is there any coffee? So, I've showed you in the formula. Make it a question. You should be saying these out loud, folks. Out loud. I cafe. Is there any coffee? And if you want to say yes, there's coffee. You You probably know yes, even if you don't speak Spanish, right? It's one of every little kid knows that. What do you got? Cafe.
So, I gave you a little pattern, right? You learned it right away. So, if I give you another Spanish word, let's say fas, right? We'll make it plural. Fas are strawberries. And you just learned that word and you know this and you want to ask somebody. Let's say you go to the store, are there any strawberries? How you going to do it? Iasas. Ias. So, you may never have said that or even heard that in Spanish, but you just figured out the pattern much faster than say hundreds of hours or thousands of hours and be like, I I've heard I a lot. I think if I can put it together like that, this is just so much faster.
Now, you might be going, "Okay, Paul, I'm kind of sold in this whole patterns thing. I saw the other video. How do I start using it? Like, how do I learn it?" Well, that's how I teach because that's how I learned. That's how I reach fluency. So, if you follow my channel, you're going to be learning with patterns all the time. If you want something more structured, if you pop over to the playlist, you're going to find the Spanish master course. Just watch lessons one and two, and you're going to be making sentences in Spanish from your English, following patterns that you may never have seen or heard before in your life, but that fast, you'll be creating sentences. So, you'll find the first five lessons of that course um on the main channel. If you want to take the whole course, um I have a private learning group called the Curu Spanish Crew. The entire course is over there. I think there's 66 lessons. There's an intermediate course over there. There's a ton of um other exclusive content, downloads, live events, a form to ask questions. Just a lot going on over there. So, if you really like it, you want to take the whole thing, just uh pop over to the Curu Spanish Crew. You'll find a link to that as well in the description section.
So, that's 50% of our time as a beginner. Now, the next 45% of our time is going to be exposure to Spanish. I really like um reading in Spanish. And the reason is is because you slow down. You can back up. You can see how things are structured. And that's how you're actually going to start to learn chunks of words because you're like, I like this little chunk that's going to work well with my Spanish. I'm going to add it to my Spanish word list and start to work it into the sentences that I'm learning. You know, other patterns.
Now, of course, you can't just only read in Spanish because you need to start training your ear for Spanish. you want to reach a level, you know, where you're understanding shows and things. So, that's where exposure to language comes from, listening to shows and um videos, things like that. And some folks will be like, "Okay, so this is comprehensible input." Um, as I understand comprehensible input, they're not looking up words. They're trying to get context. They're trying to understand this through context. And I think that's too slow. as an adult who can speak a language, who can make a word list, who can, you know, actually make a deliberate effort to learn a language. That's too slow. What I think you should do is look up things, okay? As much as possible. Now, if you're watching a show, that's not always possible. So, there's an element of comprehensible input. If you want to do subtitles, then do Spanish subtitles, not English. You'll just you'll rely on those, you know, and you'll never actually learn the language. Just a little extra help.
Now, one of the resources I really like for something like this is Lingo Pie. I do have an affiliate link for Lingo Pie in the description section. With Lingo Pie, you watch shows and movies and um you can set it up so like off to the side you have the subtitles so they're not distracting and they're in Spanish and you can glance at them and if you don't know something, you can click on it, the video stops, you can figure out what that word is or that phrase and it will get added automatically to a flashcard list so later you can study it. I think it's a great learning tool for that. So that's 45% of our time each day.
Our last 5% is going to be practicing conversations. And this is so important to do every single day. And as a beginner, you don't have a ton of vocabulary to work with or anything. That's why we're only dedicating 5%. But we are dedicating 5%. Now, if you have somebody to help you, you know, maybe have a, you know, your significant other speaks Spanish, that's a great way to do it. You can also get um a live tutor online and spend time doing that. Of course, you know, you have to be willing to dedicate say 30 minutes I think is a minimum session. And maybe you want to practice at 4:00 in the morning like I'm always up early or just for 5 minutes or 2 minutes. That doesn't work very well for that.
But what does um like an AI tutor and there are a ton of AI tutors out there online. I mean they pop up all the time. Most of them they're okay. I was going to say garbage. they're okay. Somebody's linking a chat GPT with something and trying to put a voice to it and it's just very lacking for language learning. You know, if you're learning Spanish, you know, you want to be able to hear that accent. The accent's very important. The colloquialisms are important. So, you need an AI that's built all around language learning and, you know, having conversations with the AI.
Now, by far the best one I've seen out there is one that I've been recommending for the last couple years. Um, that's Langua. And if you go to their site, it says LanguaTalk. So at LanguaTalk, they have live tutors. Langua is their AI. It's kind of confusing their branding. You know, you might wanted to make that a little clearer. Anyway, if you decide you want to try Langua, um you can try it for free. I have an affiliate link to it in the description section of the video and also paste at the top of the comments.
Now, the reason I say you have to practice conversations is because so many people have difficulty having them even when they reach like intermediate to advanced levels. I've heard from people like Paul my vocabulary is huge. I understand everything I see, everything I hear. But when I go to speak, I'm like ah why is that? The reason is having conversations is a particular skill that you have to plan for. And you know when you learn all these things and you try to have a conversation, you're going to have some bad habits. Number one bad habit is you try to translate whole sentences in your head before you speak, right? You're like you're already you're already losing that. So, you have to practice having a conversation in real time. Use little sentence starters, little things. I I have a video dedicated to um sharing some tips about have a conversation. I'll put a link to that also in the description section that might help you.
So, let's summarize where we're at. You're an absolute beginner. You're going to spend 50% of your time on patterns and that's where your grammar, vocabulary, deliberate learning are going to occur. 45 for your center. So are going to occur 45 so we're going to occur 45% of your time on exposure to the language and that's you know hearing it watching shows and reading it and 5% having conversations every single day. So that's our absolute beginners percentages.
As you become more advanced in Spanish and you move up through intermediate, these percentages change. You're going to be spending less time um on patterns and grammar and deliberate learning. that's going to get smaller and smaller as you get more advanced. The exposure element is going to get bigger and also the conversation aspect is going to get bigger.
So that is the strategy that worked for me. It helped me reach fluency um quite quickly. Within 2 years I was already translating on really complex investigations at work and my translations were standing up, you know, to the scrutiny of defense attorneys and judges, which is it's saying something. If I couldn't speak Spanish, that wouldn't be happening.
All right. Well, that's the end of the video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, just do me a favor and give it a thumbs up. And until next time,