How to speak Spanish in LESS than a week

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As I mentioned in yesterday’s post 1st Week of learning Spanish - what I did I had decided I was gonna have a full hour speaking session after only 1 week of learning Spanish

Actually… even less than a week.

I also knew I was gonna put out parts of it up on my YouTube channel.

This motivated me but also caused me a bit of stress (sometimes I like challenges a bit too much lol).

Because I didn’t know if I was gonna be able to say much of anything after that little time.

Once I had done what I’m about to share with you guys I got more and more confident as the lesson approached.

Of course it didn’t mean I was gonna be anywhere near fluent in time for my lesson. That’s ridiculously unrealistic.

But I wanted to learn enough vocabulary to be able to carry a conversation.

For a whole hour.

I have never booked a speaking session that early in my language learning.

Let me tell ya, it definitely put a fire under under me right from the get go!

I booked a lesson with an iTalki teacher for my 7th Day of learning (scroll down to the end of this post to see the actual footage from this lesson).

What did I need to be able to do this?

Since I knew I had this speaking session lurking around the corner, I started preparing for it already on day 1.

How did I prepare for this?

I already had experience taking an approach to learning certain vocabulary when I started learning Cantonese.

This made me able to I talk to people on the streets of Chinatown San Francisco and order food after only 3 months of learning Cantonese.

And I used some specific strategies to be able to do so.

The difference this time was that I didn’t have 3 months to it, but 6 days. Yikes.

So I needed make sure what I did was efficient time-wise.

What I did was actually very simple.

I just wrote down specific vocabulary and phrases in a text document (just the “notes” app on my iPhone).

I did this just using Google Translate.

First conversations are very predictable

We you first start talking with people you haven’t talked to before, those first conversations tend to actually be very predictable.

I’ve had so many encounters with Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and other places.

And the beginning of those conversations have been almost identical.

You get the same types of questions and there are certain topics that tend to come up very early.

Even though you need a lot of vocabulary to be able to talk about a variety of topics in the language you’re learning, you can actually “hack” these conversations by learning specific “1st conversation vocabulary”.

It lets you get into the conversation in your target language right away and avoid the native speaker switching to English.

It sets the tone of “we’re speaking Spanish” (or whatever the language you’re learning).

The principles apply no matter the language.

What exactly did I write down?

The things I wrote down were things like: “I’m Swedish but I live in Finland”, “I’ve been learning Spanish for 1 week”.

Things about my life and interests, some simple questions, sentence starters and enders, as well as some simple sentence connectors such as “that is”, “although” and so on.

Just these things that are useful for first conversations.

When you start talking to native speakers in their native language they almost ALWAYS ask questions such as: “How come you know Spanish?”, “How long have you learned"?”, “Where have you learned?”, “How long did you live in Hong Kong?” (they often assume you’ve lived in the country if you know their language).

You get the idea.

It’s worth spending some time being able to recognize those questions as well as being able to answer them.

So what I did throughout the week was just having imaginary conversations in my head in Spanish and trying to say things.

And whenever I wasn’t able to say something (which was like 99.9% of the time) I would just write these sentences down.

Just continuing to add to the list throughout the week.

If you want to know the full list of all the words I wrote down you can download a free pdf with all it:

It’s of course not an all-comprehensible list.

But will give you an idea of what type of vocabulary would be good for you to know to be able to talk to people on the streets in your target language at a very early stage.

Even if you’re not learning Spanish, you can take this list of words and phrases as a blueprint and apply it to the language you’re learning.

Just switch out some of the things so it applies to your own life and interests.

Even though you’ll have very simple conversations at this early stage it’s incredibly motivating for your language learning.

Afterwards you just wanna run home and learn more so that you can speak even better next time.

How much Spanish was I able to speak in less than a week?

Well, you can watch the video below and see for yourself.

For the whole hour, I was able to have a conversation purely in Spanish, using no English (aside from 4-5 words maybe).

It was a simple conversation, but I managed.

I did this through the foundation I had laid with my “Conversation Cheat Sheet”.

If you wanna see this sheet in action check out part of the conversation I had with my iTalki teacher at the end of this video (it starts at 09:04):

Let me know in the comments below how well you guys thought I did!