An Interesting Observation on Learning Spanish, or...

For this post I want to share with you an interesting experience myself and my friends had this past month watching how people where learning Spanish and English. For the past two months, the orchestra in which I play in went on a 47 concert concert tour around the USA. If you didn’t know, I am a classical musician.

The part that was interesting was watching my colleagues’ progress with their English. some of them had some rudimentary skills, but many didn’t speak a word. Over the past two months the people who didn’t rely on any of us native English speakers slowly improved their English.

The basic thing they did was to learn little phrases such as “how much”, “I want”, “beer” and “where is the bathroom”, or sometimes it was just “toilet?” By the end of the tour, they were able to string sentences along and actually did quite well.

What’s the lesson for the rest of us? When learning Spanish, especially if you are on a trip to a Spanish speaking country, take it slowly and learn small phrases at a time. Concentrate only on what you need to get accomplished at the moment, and pretty soon your Spanish will improve very quickly.

Common Mistakes While Learning Spanish...

You know there are many types of mistakes that one makes while learning Spanish or any other language, that are actually a result of the teaching methods and materials that you may be using. These “teacher induced errors” are technically called “transfer of training” and are a very common problem.

One example of this is looking at how some students learn their second language. For example, some of my friends, including me, have learned Spanish while being totally immersed in the language by living in Mexico and not necessarilly learning at a proper school. We would get help from friends. In my case, a good friend explained to me that in general, nouns that end in “a” are feminine and ones that end in “o” are masculine. Ok, sounds easy enough.

The problem arrives with all of the “exceptions to the rule” that all foreign languages always have. Some of my typical errors are “la agua.” The correct way is “el agua.” Another one is “la problema.” It should be “el problema.” One last one is “Me gusto (instead of ‘gusta’ because ‘he’ is masculine) la manzana.