Complete Spanish: A Teach Yourself Program

"I’m a big fan of the Teach Yourself series. I have been for a very, very long time, and they ultimately brought me on to teach my own courses with them. So I’m good friends with that publisher now. But long before they ever got in touch with me, I liked that they had a traditional course—what people think of when they’re looking for a language course—something that has exercises, that teaches you some grammar, that has vocabulary lists. I like the process that they use more than other courses, because they don’t try to overload you with grammar, and they try to give you some example conversations. It’s a good balance. I definitely like how Teach Yourself does it. It’s like anything. If you want to improve your skills, you need to be as dedicated as possible. One thing I would recommend—especially with languages, because languages require you to change how you think in certain ways—is rather than putting in 30 minutes a day, for a year, I would suggest that, for the next three months, you make a few sacrifices. Don’t watch your favourite shows on Netflix, take one less day out of the week to go out with your mates to the pub, and make these sacrifices—not for the rest of your life, but for a short period. Then for those months you put in a few hours a day, if you can. Say you were going to put 1,000 hours towards learning Spanish. You could spread that out over five years. I’m sure many people would relate to that from doing it in school. I studied German in school, spread those hours out, and in the end I didn’t really have that much to show for it. But when you are doing it consistently, and you keep momentum up, you really do see a difference. So I would recommend people try to do intensive bursts to get themselves started with a language. Do two hours in one session rather than four half-hour sessions, and you’ll get so much better bang for your buck. Yes. And it is hard to feel that benefit at the initial stages. When we think of speaking a language, we use our native language as a basis of comparison. So we think of success as when we’re able to have a certain level of complexity—like, you can talk about your deepest philosophical beliefs. You can reach that stage, and I have reached that stage in several of my languages, but you get there only by embracing the beginner stages. So: you have to feel a lot of pride in the fact that maybe you did just have a five-minute conversation about what you do on Monday mornings, you know? The other stuff will come. This is why I say I have a goal of making mistakes. I aim to make 200 mistakes a day—that’s kind of part of my philosophy. Then it’s a lot easier to get into your flow, because you’re ticking that box of making mistakes rather than ticking the box of, ‘I’m going to have a debate on the meaning of existence in Spanish.’ That’s not something you really want to be worried about in your first months."