How I Learned Spanish To Fluency in 3 Months

Up to the age of 31, I could only talk two languages. My native language of Hebrew and English, which I spent a long time speaking while living in Australia.

But I’ve learnt to speak 3 more languages in the last few years, to varying degrees of fluency. I’d like to share my experiences with learning Spanish – the one I’ve achieved the highest level of fluency in.

Travelling With an Audio Course

I left Australia in May 2012, heading for South America. The plan was to do a few months of travelling in South American before I settle in Colombia.

I spoke at best a few words in broken Spanish, and I learned quickly that just being in Spanish speaking countries was not enough to learn the language.

As a traveller, I could – and did – get by consistently with few sentences. Knowing how to say “the bill, please”, “what’s the wifi password?” and “where is (insert place I was looking for)?” was usually enough.

But learning Spanish was a goal of mine, and parroting sentences I memorized was getting boring. I started focusing on the wonderful Michel Thomas Spanish Audio course (now also available as an iPhone app).

I got initial results from the Audio course – mostly understanding some grammar and Spanish sentence structure. However, I still didn’t understand most things spoken to me, and was very far from having a flowing, back and forth conversation.

Medellin

Medellin, Colombia is where my Spanish really blew up.

I made Medellin my home base, and really wanted to integrate into the culture. Most Colombians hardly speak  any English, so I really had to learn Spanish. This was my simple motivation.

Getting the Right Language Teacher

After having tried some group classes, I really believe in learning language in 1-on-1 settings more. The extra attention and feedback I get from the teacher make sure that I’m more focused and get the best value out of my classes.

I tried a few teachers when I arrived in Medellin but something just didn’t seem “to click”. I had already been reading the excellent fluent in 3 months blog, where polyglot Benny Lewis recommended speaking as much of a language as possible in the early stages of learning in order to achieve fluency fast.

I felt that this element was lacking with my first few teachers. Even though I told them I wanted to speak more Spanish, they always ended up explaining concepts or having conversations in English! Soon, I felt like I hit a plateau. My actual conversational fluency wasn’t improving – I was just learning more and more grammatical concepts. I had a cerebral understanding of Spanish, but not the flowing expressive quality I was after.

Then, luckily, someone pointed me to Federico, an excellent language teacher who unfortunately doesn’t teach anymore (but runs this school in Medellin).

Walking into his classroom for the first time, he greeted me with warm energy, and I felt immediately welcome. It was a good sign I didn’t even have to tell him I want to maximize Spanish conversation time – he made it clear that no English would be spoken during lessons.

Doubts about Spanish Only Classes

Initially talking in nothing but Spanish felt uncomfortable. I also had a lot of worries in mind about how it would all work out.

• What if I wanted to say something but was missing the right word in Spanish?
• What if he wanted to explain a new word or concept to me but can’t use English to translate it?

The answers to those two questions came quickly.

When there was a word in Spanish I didn’t know, I instead just described it in a roundabout way.

For example, let’s say I forgot the Spanish word for chair – “silla”. Instead, I would say in Spanish, “the thing you sit on”, and perhaps tap my own chair. Federico would reply with “Ah! La Silla!”.

Why is this good?

Because when you learn a language, you’ll often find yourself in this situation – missing a word. Finding a way to express “around a word” you’re lacking is an essential skill. Also, a native speaker would always happily give you the word you’re looking for, which would make it more likely you’d remember it next time. It’s like a fun game of charades.

In the same way, when Federico used a word I didn’t know, he would describe it in Spanish. Sometimes he would draw on the board, point to an object in the room, give a few examples of this concept and so on. Only when we were really “stuck” did he say the English word.

What Do You Talk About?

What did we talk about during class? Well, Federico introduced and taught grammatical concepts. I asked questions. And then he asked me to talk about my life and use those concepts.

I would tell him about my business, and my relationship (which I’ll tell you about shortly), and my friends. Of course I got stuck a lot and made a lot of mistakes – and he corrected me – but not too much.

Flow and Fun, not Perfection

This is another thing I make sure I focus on when I start learning a language now. The focus is on flow of conversation and being understood – not on avoiding mistakes at all costs. When other teachers corrected every tiny mistake I made, the flow of conversation was broken. I wasn’t having fun and I didn’t develop confidence in my abilities. Correcting someone just the right amount is a tricky skill, and Federico had it.

Most importantly, I enjoyed my daily study time with Federico every day. It didn’t feel like learning a language – but more like hanging out with a friend. I wanted to understand what he said, I wanted him to understand me. As banal as it sounds, fun was the fuel that motivated my Spanish learning.

Daily Effort is The Jam

After seeing that I liked Federico I committed to 2 hours a day, 5 days a week. I continued at that level of intensity for 6 weeks – about 60 hours.

Daily effort over time is worth a lot more than extreme cramming. Even if I could do 60 hours over 6 days – 10 hours a day – it would not be the same. The daily practice over a longer period of time signalled to my brain that Spanish was an important thing.

The Human Dictionary

They have an expression in Spanish – “Los idiomas se aprenden en la cama o en la cuna”, which roughly translates to “Languages are learned either in the crib or in the bedroom.”

It’s a tongue-in-cheek way of saying that nothing motivates one to learn a language more than trying to speak it with a romantic partner. Luckily for me, Colombia is famous for its warm, chatty and beautiful women. I’m also a huge fan of the way women from Medellin speak Spanish – it sounds like a beautiful singsong melody.

All of this was in the back of my mind when I moved to Medellin. I was looking forward to start dating some locals and living in my own little telenovela. In my first week, I met a lovely Colombian girl. We started dating and she became my girlfriend.

So far so good right? Well, I forgot to mention she (unlike %99 of Colombians) was also very fluent in English.

My Spanish was very basic back then and I didn’t limit myself in talking only Spanish with her. I felt like stumbling upon words in Spanish when we could have been communicating more freely in English was awkward. Looking back, this could be a limiting belief.

Online Chatting

Either way, we did chat a lot online – an hour on Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp every day if I had to guesstimate. And somehow, unlike when we met in person, we always wrote to each other in Spanish.

After my language class of the day, it was a great time to actually use the concepts I learned in the real world. By asking her about her day I got to learn not just about her life but also a lot of daily useful Spanish. Improving my Spanish became what it should be – just improving communication between two people.

Google Translate Time

In retrospect, written chats were an awesome way for me to learn. Facebook messenger and Google Translate are the perfect storm, an amazing language learning combination.

Since it’s normal to not respond immediately to text and chat messages, I had time to run her messages and my responses through Google translate when I needed to. The machine translation was far from perfect, but it was certainly enough to get the rough meaning of new words and expressions.

One note on Google Translate – I was pretty lucky my ex-girlfriend didn’t use a lot of text shorthand – “kinda lyk dis”. Google Translate is useless with that.

For people who aren’t dating someone speaking their target language and don’t mind the thumb pain, I suggest using “HelloTalk” – a fun Application for android and iPhone. Using it, you can usually find people learning your native language, who will be happy to write to you in their language. The motivation to talk for hours might not be as strong as dating someone, but the app is useful, fun, simple and free.

Either way, after about two months of daily lessons and getting texters’ thumb, I found my Spanish at a whole new level. I could have longer conversations and understand about %80-%90 of what was said to me. Everything just became easier.

The only thing was – I was still talking pretty slow. That made it hard to have a natural paced conversation with another person.

Improving Speed By Learning Songs

For Christmas 2012, I went on a weekend holiday to Cali with a few other foreigner friends living in Colombia. I noticed that my friend Patrick (who had been talking Spanish about the same time as me) was talking Spanish a lot faster than me. He was making a lot more mistakes too, but it didn’t matter – people understood him all the same.

Even though I worked on conversational flow, I was still trying to avoid making mistakes. Patrick was just trying to get ideas out of his mind into other people’s minds as quickly as possible.

I couldn’t even talk that quick if I wanted to. So I decided to train my mouth for a new speed in Spanish by learning songs. I picked songs that were super catchy, and started memorizing them 15-second segment at a time (about 2 or 3 short sentences).

The first song I learnt was this. (careful, it’s really catchy!)

In retrospect, the speed of singing in this song isn’t very quick – but I remember trying to sing along with it and finding it impossible. Pretty soon though my mouth got comfortable with producing Spanish sounds quicker.

I think learning songs isn’t for everyone. A lot of people don’t like singing, don’t remember lyrics or find the entire process too boring or too challenging. My brain likes songs – I remember lyrics to many  English songs I enjoyed as a teenager to this day. Even after years of learning Spanish songs I can reproduce their lyrics perfectly. In fact, I still enjoy learning fun catchy songs – I just finished learning the lyrics to this one this past week (also extremely catchy).

Learning songs was the last building block on my way to basic Spanish fluency. I could speak at a decent speed now. I understood a lot of what was spoken to me, and wasn’t shy about asking for clarifications when I didn’t. All of that happened quite rapidly, within 3 months or so of getting to Medellin. The truth is, I think my level has plateaued and stayed consistent since then – at a very comfortable high intermediate.

Conclusions

I went over how I learned Spanish in this article. The biggest things for me were starting with Michel Thomas Audio Courses, getting a great private teacher and text conversations with a local. I learned quick songs to improve my speed of speaking Spanish.

Realistically, I estimate my level of Spanish is high intermediate fluent (B2 on the CEFR). I still lack some basic vocabulary that I just never had a chance to use (for example, I learned the word for “fence” only a few days ago). To get to the next level I would have to get into a lot of reading, watching movies and shows in Spanish and serious vocabulary expansion, alongside with some work on advanced grammar.

I used my insights from learning Spanish into the other two languages I learned – German and Portuguese – and got better pretty quickly. I hope you got something out of them as well!

As always – any question or comment is welcome. Let me know what your favorite ways of learning a language are, or what didn’t work for you and was a total waste of time.

Hasta la proxima mis amigos!
Almóg