Lonely Planet Spanish Phrasebook & Dictionary

"Yes. Like Olly gives you the conversational language you’re likely to use in many scenarios, this is specifically a collection of pre-made questions that you’re likely to ask, and pre-made answers you’ll hear in response. So it’s not necessarily conversations, but those initial bursts when you want to form a full sentence. Let’s say, there are certain things that you know you’re going to ask, so rather than say, ‘Bathroom, where?’ you can learn the phrase, ‘Where is the bathroom?’ because that’s something that you ask regularly enough. Instead of learning the grammatical process behind that, you can just take the entire phrase like it’s one chunk of information, and learn that phrase. This phrasebook is essentially a list of all of these phrases that travellers tended to need a lot, and there is a lot of overlap between travel-related phrases and phrases you’re likely to use in other situations—say, if you are learning Spanish to speak to a Spanish-speaking family member. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . People can learn these phrases without needing to understand the complexity of the grammar behind them. Because even if you don’t yet understand the difference between ‘is,’ ‘be,’ and ‘are,’ or whether it’s in the first, second or third person, you can still learn the phrase, ‘Where is the supermarket?’ and say it off the cuff, and be confident it’s a grammatically correct sentence. Whenever I travel to a country, the first thing I do is pick up one of these phrasebooks, because that way I can just learn full phrases for the absolute essentials. I can say things, I can communicate, I can see what their likely replies are going to be in those scenarios. One of the reasons I didn’t recommend books that are grammar-heavy is not necessarily because I am anti-grammar. It’s more the case that I’m presuming that the people who are seeking this kind of advice are beginners, and I highly, highly recommend beginners do not put a lot of time into grammar. With that being said, when you have that momentum in the language and you reach a certain level, an intermediate level where people can talk to you if they’re patient and you can actually have quite a lot of conversations— that ‘s the point where grammar becomes very useful. And it’s not just useful, then, but interesting. Because here’s the thing: if I gave you a random grammatical explanation about Spanish and you have just started to learn it, it’s got nothing for you to attach it to. It’ll go in one ear, out the other, it’s not interesting. “I highly, highly recommend beginners do not put a lot of time into grammar” Whereas if you’ve already learned Spanish for quite a while and can say lot, you just don’t really understand the logic, when I explain a rule, it’s like a light bulb goes off in your head. You’re like, ‘ That ‘s why they say it that way.’ That extra bit of context makes it interesting, and that makes it more fun to learn, because you’re filling in the gaps when you already have a lot of language to fill with. Getting grammar first is like getting the blueprints of a house when you don’t have any materials to build with, you know? I do like grammar-heavy books, but only as an intermediate learner. At that stage, I have enough enough vocabulary, I have enough practice, I’m able to communicate—I’m just not able to communicate in a sophisticated-sounding way. It’s time to tidy things up. You don’t tidy an empty house, you know? Well, it really depends on what the goals you have for that language. When people imagine high levels of proficiency, I think they imagine working professionally in the language, which is absolutely great. So, for instance, I have a C2 diploma in Spanish. This is given by the Instituto Cervantes, and is the highest level of mastery that you can get in a language from this institution. So I can work as a professional engineer in Spanish, and that’s great. I had to work very hard and put a lot of effort into that. But, realistically, at the level I was before that—let’s say the B2 level on the European scale —I was socially equivalent. I could go hang out in the pub with my mates, and talk about everything in Spanish like I would in English. That’s not the mastery level, but that’s actually more than enough for what a lot of people need. Most people don’t need to work as a professional in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalency in the language. That’s why I would tend to have that as an ultimate goal for most people, because maybe, yes, you want to be bilingual, have perfect equivalency, and do everything that you can do in English, but we don’t really need to do everything in a second language that we need to do in English. “Most people don’t need to work as a professional in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalency” Sometimes we just need to have an active social life, and that is an absolutely worthy end goal that you can reach realistically in the space of a year—less, if you’re doing it intensively. And this is where I like to go with these languages. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter When it comes to attaining a level of mastery, at that stage getting exposure in conversation doesn’t really help you. There’s only a certain point you’ll get to with conversation, it’s not going to help you to refine your edges. In that case, my advice isn’t special. I would just say: ‘You’ve got to study.’ because there’s nothing magical and there’s no shortcuts at this stage. It’s just putting in the hard work of refining those edges. But you can get to the conversational stage in a lot of fun and interesting ways, and that’s why I like to advise people to have a dynamic learning approach. So: conversational practice as early as possible, and that’ll get you to the conversational stage. If you want to be able to read in Spanish too, you’ve got to change up your methodology and your entire approach. Have more reading incorporated, and maybe do some more academic things. Conversation is great, but that’s not the be all, end all of language learning."