1st week of learning Spanish - What I did

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In my previous post Learning Spanish… in Less Than 2 Weeks?! I talked about the fact that I was all of a sudden gonna learn Spanish.

The why behind me doing it.

In this post I’d like to share more about what I did and about the resources I used.

What they are and how they helped me get off to a good start in learning Spanish.

So if you’re just starting to learn Spanish OR you want to start learning but don’t know how or where to begin, this post is for you.

My tips will still apply if you’re learning another language (although it will depend a bit on what language it is).

Transfering from English to Spanish

The first resource I used to learn Spanish was a course called Language Transfer.

I had been curious about checking it out for quite some time. I had heard good things about it.

It’s an app that is actually completely free, made by a Greek guy named Mihalis.

He has a few other languages in there as well such as Greek, French, Italian, Arabic, Turkish and Swahili.

The course consists of audio lessons that are on average 8-10 minutes long. Some languages have more lessons and some less.

Spanish has a whopping 90 of them.

I’m usually not someone who likes or even believes in studying grammar (I mean I called my website Lingtuitive for a reason).

But I found the Language Transfer course very refreshing. It takes quite an interesting approach to it.

The course takes what you already know in English and through some clever thinking helps you transfer this into Spanish.

Once you learn the right thinking you can take these English words and just apply certain rules so that they become Spanish words.

For example, you can take every single word that ends with “tion” in English (Information, imagination, confirmation etc.) and just remove the “tion”.

You then add an “r” and voilá, you now have a Spanish “to”-verb.

So the word “imagination” becomes “imaginar”, meaning “to imagine” in Spanish”. And “information” becomes “informar”, meaning “to inform”.

All the “ty” endings such as “reality” you just replace with a “dad”. So reality becomes “realidad” in Spanish.

There are many things like this, as well as learning useful ways of thinking where you don’t have rely on memorizing anything.

I did Duolingo for almost a year (without being able to speak or understand Spanish) and I never saw the connections Language Transfer gave me.

The course consists of the creator Mihalis working one on one with a student.

He asks the student how to say certain things in Spanish through the bits and pieces of logic he gives her.

You’re encouraged to think about these answers and respond yourself as well.

It really helps to give a framework for Spanish and to help you get into the Spanish “way of thinking”.

It’s quite an addicting course actually. I highly recommend it.

Although just like every resource, it doesn’t give you everything you need to learn your target language.

I needed something more to practice listening & speaking

After 2 days of doing Language Transfer I did feel like I needed to add something more to my Spanish learning game.

I needed to actually start learning words and phrases for having conversations with people.

I had used the course Pimsleur for when I first started learning Finnish, and I remembered enjoying it back then.

So I decided to give it a go with Spanish (read this post for tips on how to best use Pimsleur)

Pimsleur is an audio-based course where you’ll hear a short conversation between two people at the start of each lesson.

Each lesson is 30 mins and this conversation is then broken down into bite-sized pieces.

You’ll do a bit of role playing of sorts and learn how to use the vocabulary in different situations.

You’ll learn the necessary pieces and then be prompted to say things along the lines of: “You’re at restaurant and you want to ask: where is the bathroom?”.

There is then a short pause so you can say this phrase out loud in Spanish.

Shortly after that you’ll then hear this phrase being said by a native speaker - “Donde está el baño”, which will confirm whether you got it right or not.

It just keeps building these mini conversations with different vocabulary piece by piece and it’s easy to follow along.

What I really liked about it is that Pimsleur really nails the pace of learning a new language.

It has enough repetition to the point where you really engrain these new bits of information into your muscle memory and unconscious mind.

But Pimsleur doesn’t stay too long on the same material where it gets repetitive, but it moves on to the next thing at just the right moment.

Everything you've learned keeps repeating throughout in these conversation scenarios.

Which is great, because it’s important to get a lot of repetition when we’re new to a language. To get all the new words to really stick.

Finnish only has 30 lessons, but Spanish has 150 lessons (!). Which is plenty of material. For sure.

And honestly, with Spanish I think I have been enjoying it even more than I did with Finnish.

The Spanish course just feels really well-made.

A downside is that it starts off using polite language, which I didn’t find to be very useful. But luckily it does move on after a while to more informal language.

Pimsleur also has quizzes, flashcards and bonus vocabulary and things like that.

I would recommend skipping those and instead focus on where the real benefit is - the audio lessons.

If you’d like to try Pimsleur out you can get a Free 7-Day Pimsleur trial by clicking HERE.

The 7-day trial is only available US, UK, Canada & Australia. But if you’re from any other country you can get a lesson for free by clicking the same link.

Pimsleur nowadays has a subscription service, which makes it a lot more affordable than buying the whole course (like I did when learning Finnish).

You subscribe month to month so you can just subscribe for as long as you’re using it. And then just cancel the subscription when you’re done with it.

If you’re only gonna pick one resource for when you’re just starting to learn a new language, I’d go with Pimsleur.

There was still something missing…

Pimsleur and Language Transfer was working really well in combination.

But there was still something missing.

Hearing the language in context.

When learning a new language it’s really important to get short, bite-size pieces of the language. It’s what our brains are ready for at that point. This is what Pimsleur does.

But to be able to really understand what people are saying in conversations, movies, TV, youtube etc. we need to hear longer stretches of the language.

This is one of the reason people never get fluent by using only apps like Duolingo. It’s only short sentences, and as soon as we start hearing several of those strung together at the speed of a native speaker, we’re lost in the sea of words.

I could have honestly still just continued with Pimsleur and Language Transfer and been fine for a while.

I just happened to have a desire to start hearing more natural spoken Spanish.

I figured I’d might as well get started in increasing my listening comprehension right away.

The sooner the better.

Because when getting to the point of approaching the beginning of the intermediate stages that’s mostly what I would be doing anyway.

So I decided to add my favorite language learning app into the mix - LingQ (use this link to get a longer free trial + 37% off).

I’ve used the app every single day for the past 2-3 years to learn Cantonese & Finnish. And my wife has used it to learn Swedish

It’s in my opinion a brilliant app and webpage for getting input through listening and reading.

I’ve mostly used it to import different interesting books written in my target language and used those for my language learning.

But I just started scrolling the Spanish material and was shocked at how much was available!!

I mean I’ve used LingQ to import YouTube videos in the past, but with Spanish there is just endless material available!

There are traveling videos, cooking shows, podcasts, interviews, Spanish soap operas, you name it.

Everything has both the audio and the transcription. Plus the ability to click on each word to see the definition, which is super helpful and convenient.

You also keep track of how many new words you’re learning and how many words you know in total, which is a huge boost for motivation.

So I just started with the LingQ mini stories that are available and listened to those and then listened to some podcasts.

It’s challenging in the beginning, but the words will eventually just get clearer and clearer in your mind.

It’s a lot of fun to use those types of materials to learn a language and it’s also super effective.

Preparing to speak Spanish for 1 hour

In order to be able to have a conversation after less than a week I had a simple yet effective method to be able to do so.

Something I did throughout my first week.

Check out this post to read more about that: How to speak Spanish in LESS than a week