I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.
I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.
I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.
Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.
Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.
And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.
>Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.
Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude harder.
I'll second that - in addition to my home university studies, I spent a year on exchange in Japan where pretty much all I did was study kanji and vocab - because we had at test on the 1942 kanji called necessary.
As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that gives context.
As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.
Well, that depends very much on your level. If you are completely new to Spanish (like I was), you'll need to bootstrap the learning process with something really basic.
I started using an audio course from Pimsleur, teaching me to say "Where is the hotel?" etc.
After that, I still needed material of the simpler kind suitable for foreigners. There are a bunch of such podcasts, for example:
When you're getting bored with the stuff for foreigners, you'll find a wealth of "normal" podcasts in Spanish. Don't worry if you don't understand every word, as long as you get the basic gist.
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I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.
I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.
I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.
Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.
Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.
And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.