Starts and Stops
My bumbling and stumbling journey with the Spanish language
One of the Republican candidates for Superintendent of Public Instruction in Arizona has a plan for “English only” education. The idea is to immerse English language learners into English courses so they grasp the language better before being thrown into the full K-12 curriculum.
I don’t know if this is a good idea. Obviously, it’s hard to learn history (in English) if you don’t speak English very well. And it’s hard to teach history (in English) to students who don’t speak English very well.
The critique of English-only instruction is that students will miss out on normal coursework and social development while being isolated from natural English language conversations.
My own view is that we need to do a better job of teaching languages.
I would even flip the concept around and argue that students in Arizona should grow up learning both English and Spanish.
Why not?
The United States has the second largest population of Spanish speakers in the world. Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world. Students grow up learning multiple languages in almost every country in Europe.
I didn’t take Spanish classes until high school, but I wish I had learned from a younger age, when language learning comes more naturally.
After three years of Spanish courses in high school, I had the skills to conjugate many verbs, but I didn’t have the skills to hold a conversation with a native speaker.
Motivation is a key component to learning. I’m in my mid-thirties now, and my biggest obstacle to developing in Spanish is day-to-day motivation. It’s easy to browse the internet looking for resources that would help me understand Spanish better; it’s hard to sit down for 1-2 hours per day for focused practice. The latter, sustained over several years, is the only real way for a person to gain fluency in a language, other than full immersion into a language culture.
In my mid-twenties I caught a spark of motivation and it helped me clear an important learning curve. One summer, during graduate school, I decided to take a trip to Guatemala to attend an immersive language school for a couple weeks. There, I stayed with a native speaker and attended 1-on-1 classes with a Spanish instructor. In my mind before the trip, this is what it would take: Fly down there, cram all the Spanish into my brain, and I would be good to go. Before the trip I practiced with Rosetta Stone and struggled mightily to finally be able to pronounce sounds like the double ‘r’ sound in tierra.
After a couple weeks at the language school, I did a bit of traveling in Central America and found that I was decent at practical communication. I still couldn’t understand or participate in a fluent conversation, but I could make small talk and figure out directions and buy bus tickets and stuff like that.
Upon my return to the States, people told me my Spanish pronunciation was decent, but I didn’t continue to practice. The limited fluency I had attained on the trip soon faded. Although my baseline comprehension and pronunciation skills were higher than before the trip, I was again resigned to the fact that I would probably never be a fluent Spanish speaker.
My motivation in the past few years has increased, partly because there have been a few students in my classes each year who struggle with English. As a teacher, I feel like I should be able to provide these students at least a rudimentary translation of directions and concepts.
For the past year I’ve been able to sustain a moderate level of sustained practice. I keep reminding myself of the benefits of increased fluency, and assuring myself that, even if I don’t see the gains right away, they will show up over time.
My favorite Spanish language podcast is called No Hay Tos. It’s basically just two guys around my age who live in Mexico and shoot the shit about their country and stuff going on in the news. They also make episodes to analyze Spanish grammar and practice with verbs and expressions. If you subscribe to their Patreon, they will email transcripts of their episodes and other PDF guides to help you learn the nuts and bolts of the language. This podcast is smart and funny — I will find myself laughing even during an episode about grammar.
My favorite Spanish read is a Substack called Mind Tricks. I’m not sure why the title of the newsletter is in English, because the entire newsletter is written in Spanish. It’s a newsletter about the digital world, marketing, and human behavior. The author is a communications strategist who specializes in consumer behavior. It’s not a language instruction newsletter at all — just a great newsletter that I look forward to reading, even when it takes me extra time to translate the parts I don’t understand.
Those two resources are what I’d call the “main course” of my Spanish diet.
Besides those, I purchased a digital resource, Rocket Languages, that contains multi-tiered podcast lessons and study tools. I would call it a digital textbook for the Spanish language, and I like it because, unlike monthly subscription tools, you can download the entire package and use it at your leisure indefinitely — on your phone or computer.
And then I dabble here and there. The occasional news article in Spanish. A vocab app to fill some of the brainless moments where I might otherwise be scrolling through Twitter. Physical notecards to write down interesting words or phrases. The occasional Netflix episode with Spanish subtitles.
There is another podcast called Entiende Tu Mente, about human psychology, produced in Spain where the accents and expressions are different — equivalent to the English you hear spoken in England. Occasionally I will tune in and see how much of that kind of Spanish I can pick up.
My idea is that, by incorporating these resources into my media diet, and by continuing to practice even if I don’t have perfect discipline, I will absorb enough of the language to steadily increase my understanding over time.
All this to say that language learning is a process. As it is with all forms of learning.