1. Know your “why”
It’s absolutely possible to learn Spanish fast. Very determined people do it all the time! Just like they run marathons, write Ph.D. theses and finish 6,000-piece jigsaws. If you’re reading this article on a digital device, you have all of the resources you need to learn a new language.
The limiting factor is your own motivation! It’s a matter of pushing yourself to achieve this goal at those inevitable times when you feel like giving up.
2. Break your targets into an achievable learning plan
A goal without a plan is just a wish. Someday isn’t a day of the week. Fail to plan and you plan to fail. There are a lot of cliches about the power of planning, and in the case of learning Spanish, they really have a point. To learn anything fast, you must map out how you’re going to do it and when.
Next, break those results into smaller steps, and schedule times to work on them. Look into your calendar and set aside specific times to study. In order to become a well-rounded language user, you should try to balance your time between the four main language skills (writing, reading, speaking and listening) and block out some time for grammar and vocabulary learning too. It’s a lot to consider, but that’s even more reason to take a step back and come up with a game plan.
Consistency and hard work are the secrets to an effective learning habit, and good, old-fashioned planning makes it far easier to stay consistent. Try it and be amazed!
3. Take speaking-based lessons with a tutor
With so many apps and games online to teach yourself Spanish, it’s tempting to believe that language lessons are no longer necessary. However, if you want to learn a language fast, there’s no substitute for having a professional teach it to you. Online tutoring is a flexible and cost-effective way to do this.
Most importantly for your progress, 1-on-1 tutoring means you’ll have the chance to practice speaking Spanish from lesson #1. Some learners study Spanish for years, but can still barely string a sentence together. Others manage to have a simple conversation after only a week or two. The difference? The second group started speaking before they felt “ready”! Speaking is a very different skill from writing, reading or listening, and there’s still no method of practicing it that’s as effective as working with a live partner.
Luckily, finding a great tutor to practice your speaking with has never been more convenient or affordable.
4. Memorize the first 2,000 words
According to the Spanish Dictionary from the Real Academia Española, there are 93,000 words in Spanish. But even when you get to native-level fluency, the most common ones will still be doing most of the heavy lifting in your daily conversations. It’s common sense that some words appear a lot more frequently than others. In fact, some research suggests that learning the most common 2,000 words will allow language learners to understand 80% of what they read.
Flashcards have their drawbacks as learning methods, but they’re great for quickly ingesting those great value first 2,000 words.
5. Learn the basics of grammar
Many successful adult language learners didn’t enjoy language lessons at high school. For a lot of us, those memories have just blurred into one long conjugation exercise. It’s partly for this reason that language-learning influencers (if you’re new in this corner of the internet — yes, they exist!) often tell us not to bother studying grammar. It’s boring, mechanical work, and native speakers break grammatical rules all the time.
However, as a roadmap to the language, a little grammar knowledge can go a long way. Rather than avoiding grammar altogether, try studying the bare minimum level you need to begin expressing yourself.
To have simple conversations in Spanish, you should try and learn the present tense, then one past tense — as a general rule of thumb, the preterite is most people’s first go-to. You can then use voy + a (I am going to) to “hack” the future tense. Simple! Once you are comfortable using these basic grammatical structures, you can add more tenses and rules in, as they come up in your reading and listening. But start here, and you will be able to start expressing yourself in Spanish, however clumsily, in the shortest time frame possible!
6. Build Spanish immersion into your daily life
Most YouTube videos, blog posts, and podcasts about learning a language quickly boil down to the same advice: immerse yourself in it as much as possible. Once you’re past about A1 or A2 level, most of your “study time” should be spent interacting with Spanish in ways that it is really used — via listening, speaking, writing, or reading. Immersion techniques tend to be more effective than hitting the textbooks or apps because they correspond more closely to Spanish language situations in the real world.
Get creative with your immersion techniques, and don’t restrict yourself to things that feel like studying! Ask yourself: which parts of my daily life could be in Spanish from now on? For example, you could:
- Watch a Spanish series: if you’re watching on Netflix, we love the free Chrome extension Language Learning with Netflix, which gives dual-language subtitles.
- Switch your phone language to Spanish: it’s so easy to spend an hour or two a day aimlessly scrolling. Change your settings to turn that dead time into language practice!
- Set any AI assistants to Spanish: do you have Siri, Cortana, Google Assistant, or Alexa in your life? Switch them to the Spanish version for a very patient-speaking partner.
- Write grocery lists in Spanish: or a journal, or notes to yourself, or recipes. Any regular Spanish writing activities will serve you well.
- Tune your radio to a Spanish station: make Spanish radio stations your new default and your listening skills will improve fast.
- Watch Spanish YouTube videos: next time you look for a video for a new workout, recipe, or tutorial, try searching for it in Spanish.
- Read the news in Spanish: This one is easier than it sounds because you usually have some context for what the news might be about.
7. Get (more!) speaking practice
It’s worth mentioning this a second time because it’s true: a generous amount of speaking practice is absolutely vital if you want to learn to speak Spanish fast.
As we’ve heard, those who put off starting to speak a new language will often struggle with speaking it in the long term. But it’s not just that! Speaking a new language is magic. Needing to produce the language spontaneously can help synthesize what you’ve been studying: grammar, listening, vocabulary, sentence structure. It’s an odd phenomenon, but learning how to speak Spanish can solidify your other core language skills too.
To find someone to practice your Spanish with for free, check out our guide to the best language exchange apps and websites.
8. Try sentence mining
There aren’t any shortcuts when it comes to language learning, but memorizing whole sentences can be a small exception. When you first start speaking Spanish, forming sentences is a slow and difficult process. Learn some useful phrases that you know sound natural, and you’ll have a set of templates to work with. This can help you sound more comfortable in any new language since you can include expressions from native speakers. Advocates of this method call it “sentence mining.”
9. Work on your accent
If you’re trying to learn Spanish as fast as possible, you’re just focussing on the absolutely essential language skills. With that in mind, working on your accent might seem like a frivolous use of study time or even a bit vain.
However, there are (at least!) two good reasons why it’s sensible to start perfecting your accent early on. First off, if you learn the sounds of Spanish in your first month, it’ll make your pronunciation better for the rest of your Spanish-speaking life! It’s much easier to learn good habits from the start than it is to go back and re-learn habits that are already fossilized in your mind. That’s especially true of something like speaking, which involves muscle memory. What’s more, Spanish is a phonetic language, so you only need to learn the rules once to understand how to pronounce most words.
Secondly, working on your accent can improve your listening comprehension — our most used communication skill! Many learners struggle to understand spoken Spanish at first because the speech rate tends to be much faster than English. By working on your own Spanish pronunciation, you learn how to isolate and identify the sounds of Spanish when you hear them as well. That’s two skills for the price of one!
