They EXPLAIN what you see in actual speech. So you get some grammar explanations that explain what you see in the native speaker’s sentences. The structure of their sentences will probably be a little bit different from what you’re used to in your mother tongue.While listening, you might start thinking: “Ah, so THAT’s how a Spanish native speaker would say it!”.Because you’re observing, you discover exactly how native speakers express themselves… because you have the words and word combinations right in front of you.You listen to what they say in conversations, and how they say it. But now, you start observing native Spanish speakers.You learn some basic words to describe concepts, objects, feelings etc.Successful language learning works more like this: A programming language with rules that you use to construct sentences from the ground up every time you want to say something.īut that’s not how language works! And it’s not how language learning happens in your brain either. People who learn (or teach) languages this way see language as a collection of words and grammar rules. Luckily, the only reason this is happening is because of t he way you think about language learning. I bet that’s not how you want this Spanish adventure to play out, is it? You keep noticing the difference between how you speak, and how natural native speakers sound, and you’ll eventually get frustrated, afraid to speak and think it’s impossible to learn languages as an adult.“Hm, their sentences don’t sound like mine. Why are mine so clumsy, unnatural? I’m using all the correct grammar rules, right? Why are they saying things differently?” You speak with native speakers and notice:.And yet, you’re STILL slow to string together sentences. Only, in the real world, it seems that they forgot to add some steps: Theoretically, if you do this for long enough, you’ll eventually be able to speak Spanish fluently!.So you do lots of grammar drills, cram conjugation tables and, if you’re brave, you try to speak a lot of Spanish. You think: “I need to become faster at this!”.In the beginning, piecing together sentences like this is quite a slow process, because there are so many rules to think about.That way, you can take the words and construct sentences with it. You learn words so you can describe objects, concepts, feelings etc.So here’s how most people think learning Spanish (and other languages) works. If we don’t fix that now, you’re going to waste a lot of time. Get a copy of the Effortless Conversations Bookįirst of all: Understand how learning Spanish really worksīefore we get started, we need to set some things straight… Because years of language education at school and in traditional courses (maybe even using language apps) have probably left you with some wrong (and counterproductive) ideas about language learning.