Today we are going to talk about the best books for people who are learning Spanish. but before we start, maybe you could tell us a bit about what is needed. Can we really teach ourselves to speak a new language?
absolutely. I always like to start any discussion by saying that I come from a background where “I’m not good at languages”. arts and languages, and I myself believed it very much. I’m an electronics engineer by trade and consider myself more of a technical person: good at science, math, etc. But part of the problem is this self-fulfilling prophecy; people will look for evidence as to why they are not good at languages.
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I got out of that mindset by accepting mistakes. If someone takes any of my advice, the most important thing I would say is that they have to go out and make mistakes in whatever language they are learning, whether it is Spanish or any other.
In my case, I moved to Spain. I thought that would solve my problems. But it wasn’t like that: I lived six full months in Valencia and I didn’t learn any Spanish, because all my friends spoke English. This is a mistake that many people make. They go to the field, and they have fun, but they have fun with people who speak English. what made the difference was when I finally thought, “I need to start speaking Spanish on a consistent basis.”
At that time my Spanish was absolutely miserable. completely grammatically incorrect. he didn’t know any of the words he needed to know. when I wanted to fix an electric toothbrush, I had to say, ‘the tooth machine is no good, it doesn’t work!’, but saying that in Spanish worked. I was able to get a refund. I didn’t even know the word for “refund”. I just said, “from here to there, from here to there, from here to there, from here to there”, and it worked.
This is by far the most important thing. you have to get out of the academic mindset where you need to have perfect grammar, you need to use exactly the right words, you need to sound sophisticated, and until you get to that point, you’re not really worthy of speaking the language. you need to accept sounding like a tarzan version of a spanish speaker.
ha! so take a creative approach to begin with, focusing on communicating by any means rather than focusing too much on what’s right.
definitely.
As part of your fluency project in three months, you have learned many different languages. What do you think is difficult about Spanish and what is easy?
It’s funny, because whenever people ask me what was the hardest language I’ve ever learned, I tend to say it was Spanish, but not for the reasons people might think. I have dabbled in Hungarian, and in Mandarin, and even in the Quechua language spoken by the Incas. but the reason Spanish was the hardest for me was because it was my first, and learning a language for the first time meant that I constantly doubted myself.
but in terms of comparing languages from one to another, one of the most complicated technical aspects of Spanish would be conjugation. in other European languages you don’t have the same kind of vowel changes. As an example, in Spanish, if you wanted to say the verb ‘to count’, it’s ‘contar’, so it sounds a bit like English. but if you wanted to say ‘I tell’, it’s ‘I tell’: that ‘o’ sound changes to an ‘ue’ sound and that vowel change can be very confusing. but ultimately he follows a rule, and it is a simple rule; essentially, if where that sound would appear is the stressed syllable of a word (it’s in ‘cuento’ but not in ‘countar’, since it ends in ‘r’), then the more complex version of the sound is que dices. It just takes a little practice and a lot of exposure for it to seep into your brain, but this rule applies to all similar vowel changes that initially seem random. so it follows the rules, although it may seem quite random, and you might think, “why don’t they just say ‘conto’ instead of ‘cuento’ in Spanish?”
there are many questions of this type that you will have when you start to learn any language. but one thing I like to remind people of is that if you come from English, you come from one of the most illogical languages in the world. think of the many ways you can pronounce o-u-g-h. I think there are seven or eight different ways.
yes. ‘off’ as in ‘cough’. ‘uff’ as in ‘rough’. ‘uh’ as in ‘borough’ (or ‘oh’ in American English). ‘aw’, as in ‘ought’. ‘up’, as in ‘hiccough’… those are out of my head.
so there are a lot of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies in English. Every time someone says, ‘Spanish is crazy, they do this, they do that,’ I have at least 100 retorts for them, on why English is crazier.
I could give a list of things that make Spanish different from English, but it’s better, from a mental perspective, to just accept that and move on. and when it comes to the example I just gave, with conjugations, a beginner had better not worry about it. if you’re talking to a Spaniard and you say ‘yo conto’, which isn’t quite right, like someone saying ‘me gusta-ee’ if you were speaking English, they know it’s not right, but they know what you mean. With Spanish, you’ll run into these things that are a bit tricky, but it’s okay if you don’t understand them at first.
Let’s move on to the books you recommend to learn Spanish. why don’t we start with the complete Spanish self-study textbook, which seems like a good starting point for beginner language learners? it is a workbook with a cd attached. why did you choose this particular course?
I’m a big fan of the “teach yourself” series. I have been for a long, long time, and they finally hired me to teach my own courses with them. so now I’m good friends with that publisher. but long before they contacted me, I liked that they had a traditional course, what people think of when they look for a language course, something that has exercises, that teaches you some grammar, that has vocabulary lists. I like the process they use more than other courses, because they don’t try to overload you with grammar and try to give you some example conversations. it’s a good balance. I definitely like how he does it self-taught.
If someone is learning Spanish using books, how would you suggest they approach this course? should they try to use it every day, little and often, or should they spend more time?
it’s like anything. if you want to improve your skills, you need to be as dedicated as possible.
something I would recommend, especially with languages, because languages require you to change your mindset in certain ways: Instead of spending 30 minutes a day for a year, I would suggest for the next three months. , you make some sacrifices. don’t watch your favorite shows on netflix, take one less day of the week to go out with your friends to the pub and make these sacrifices, not for the rest of your life, but for a short period. then, during those months, put in a few hours a day, if you can.
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Say you are going to spend 1,000 hours learning Spanish. I could spread that out over five years. I’m sure a lot of people would relate to that when doing it at school. I studied German at school, extended those hours and in the end I didn’t have much to show for it. but when you do it consistently and keep the momentum going, you really see a difference. therefore I would recommend people to try intensive bursts to start with a language. do two hours in one session instead of four half-hour sessions, and you’ll get much better value for your money.
That’s interesting. I guess the problem with learning Spanish using books and with language learning in general
, it is that it is difficult to maintain the momentum, the motivation for a long enough period to see the benefit.
yes. and it is difficult to feel that benefit in the initial stages. when we think of speaking a language, we use our native language as a basis for comparison. so we think of success as when we are able to have a certain level of complexity, for example, you can talk about your deepest philosophical beliefs. you can get to that stage, and I’ve gotten to that stage in several of my languages, but you only get there by adopting the beginner stages.
so: you have to be very proud of the fact that you maybe only had a five-minute conversation about what you do on Monday mornings, you know? the other things will come. That’s why I say I have a goal to make mistakes. my goal is to make 200 mistakes a day, that’s part of my philosophy. then it’s much easier to get into your flow, because you’re checking the box for making mistakes instead of checking the box for “I’m going to have a debate about the meaning of existence in Spanish.” you really want to worry in your first few months.
although I’m delighted to see that next on your list of books to learn Spanish is a book that might well answer that question. this is stories in spanish: new penguin parallel text. This is a collection of short fiction, including works by celebrated Spanish-language authors such as Gabriel García Márquez and Isabel Allende, with an English translation presented in parallel.
yes. so this comes from my philosophy of trying to use the language as quickly as possible, to get a real feel for the language and to get away from the grammatical side of things. when I was in school and learning, in my case, German, I was filled with grammar. it made the language feel much less alive. Now, with a book like this, with a parallel text, you try to read that text in Spanish first, even if it’s just a paragraph. you’re not going to understand everything, but the goal isn’t to understand everything, it’s to get as much as you can.
maybe there are only two words in a sentence that you are actually understanding. but with that in mind, you can extrapolate and guess: what are they saying? As a beginner, you won’t get much out of a book if you’re just guessing, there’s too many blanks in there, but you just look to the other page and see the English equivalent, and that way you get stuck. Now you have a lot more context and see a little more of the story, which means that when you read the next paragraph in Spanish, you’re much more likely to understand what’s going on.
“this is an authentic way of using the language in a more adult and sophisticated way”
if you’re working from scratch context throughout the book, then you’re going to be extraordinarily frustrating. but of course this bilingual text turns out to be about interesting stories, stories you may already be familiar with. you will probably be familiar with the authors, and that gives you the feeling of reading a real text, not teletubbies in Spanish, or something like that. this is an authentic way of using the language in a more adult and sophisticated way. the english is there for reference, you are not using this as if you were reading a normal novel at the end of the night. you’re using this specifically to try to get that spanish out, and english is there for you like a crutch.
and it’s okay to do so. one of the dumbest ideas i’ve ever had was trying to read the lord of the rings with just a dictionary.
ha!
It took me two weeks to get to page two and I didn’t really understand what I was reading, because I had so few individual words out of context. whereas, with the reading of a bilingual text, you get much more. you can try to read, see what you understand, and then when you see the English part, you’ll feel a certain pride, because you’ll think, ‘ah, I did know that word,’ and that gives you a boost. that is the reason why I wanted to recommend this book. Basically, you can start reading Spanish from day one, filling in all the gaps in your understanding, because obviously there will be a lot of gaps.
what you were saying before about trying to understand things using context reminded me of one of my favorite novels, ben lerner leaves the atocha station. in that, the protagonist is in madrid for a poetry scholarship, and his spanish is at such a level that each sentence releases a new set of possible meanings. a woman confides in him, but he’s not sure if her father died when she was a child, or if her father’s death made her feel like a child again… that sort of thing. “It was less like she couldn’t understand than like she understood in the chords.” I loved that description. but maybe it will lead us to the next book you’d like to recommend, which is short fiction written entirely in Spanish.
yes, this was written by a friend of mine, olly richards.
This is the man behind the popular blog: I’ll teach you a language. Why have you put this book on your list of books to learn Spanish?
what i like about this book is that olly tried to create a genuine dialogue from the real world. because a problem I have with a lot of textbooks is that it can seem extremely artificial. I used an audio course that tried to teach me a language using all this business terminology. it was all about ‘my wife and my secretary’, and at that time I didn’t have a wife, I didn’t have a secretary. I found it so irrelevant that the conversation felt bland.
what olly did in these books is he really tried to make the conversations realistic in terms of what people are most likely to use as beginners. and then of course using those stories as a way to teach the language. therefore, he has the context of real, real Spanish that he’s likely to come across, while also getting a bit of support in terms of learning how the language works.
olly also has a collection of stories aimed at intermediate learners, a book that could offer a useful stepping stone for those who have been learning Spanish for a while. The next book to be discussed is Spanish Vocabulary Mastery. this book has 13,000 entries, it also comes with audio files. Why did you choose this particular vocabulary book to learn Spanish and how much time do you suggest people spend memorizing new vocabulary?
so a book like this is definitely not the kind of book you want to read cover to cover. it is essentially just a list of words. but the power of this book is that if you have certain conversations that you know you are likely to have, then you can move into that category.
this has been great for me. I used an earlier print of this same book when I first moved to Spain a few months into my project when, for example, I needed to find a new flat. then i went to the housing section and saw a very simple list of all the words related to what i would need to know in terms of floor space and how high the rent would be. so: just words like ‘rent’, ‘apartment’, ‘door’, etc. it’s better than a dictionary, because they are all collected by category and won’t overwhelm people with the number of words they don’t know.
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okay, yeah. so you can gorge yourself in advance, when you know in advance what specific scenarios are about to arise.
In your experience, there are certain words you will need more than others. As an engineer, my first job in Spain was related to engineering. so I needed to know technical words much faster than I needed to know, for example, country names. in a generic vocabulary list, you tend to hear the translation of country names much faster than the technical words for computer parts. that makes sense to the vast majority of people, but your particular case will be different from someone else’s. each individual needs to learn the vocabulary that is relevant to them. I needed to learn to talk about my travels, I needed to learn to talk about Ireland in particular, I needed to talk about technical aspects related to my work.
Again, as a beginner, you don’t want to worry too much about grammar. it’s okay if you’re saying breathy things like, “grocery store, where?” instead of putting together a perfect sentence. you can do so much more with more words, and that’s why a book like this can be so helpful.
understood. this is getting back to your point that communication is top priority. And I assume the same reasoning fuels your final choice, the lonely planet phrasebook and dictionary?
yes. Since Olly gives you the conversational language you’re likely to use in many scenarios, this is specifically a collection of pre-made questions 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 complete sentence.
let’s say there are certain things you know you’re going to ask, so instead of saying ‘where’s the bathroom?’, you can learn the phrase ‘where’s the bathroom?’, because that’s something you ask with quite regularly. Instead of learning the grammatical process behind it, you can just take the entire sentence as a piece of information and learn that sentence. this phrasebook is essentially a list of all these phrases that travelers used to need a lot, and there’s a lot of overlap between the travel-related phrases and the phrases you’re likely to use in other situations, for example if you’re learning Spanish to speak to a family member who speaks Spanish.
People can learn these phrases without needing to understand the complex grammar behind them. because even if you don’t yet understand the difference between ‘is’, ‘ser’ and ‘are’, or if 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 trust that 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 learn full phrases for the absolute essentials. I can say things, I can communicate, I can see what their likely responses will be in those scenarios.
yes, I understand. It’s interesting, because you have a very different vision than Harry Mount, who recommended the best books to learn Latin, but I think that’s necessarily the case. Spanish is a living language, and most beginning language learners will focus on the conversational elements: understanding and being understood. but at what stage do you think you need to spend time learning grammar? Or does that tend to fall into place on its own, with enough practice?
One of the reasons I didn’t recommend books with a lot of grammar is not necessarily because I’m anti-grammar. it’s more the case that I assume people looking for this kind of advice are beginners, and I strongly advise beginners not to spend a lot of time on grammar. That being said, when you have that momentum in the language and you get to a certain level, an intermediate level where people can talk to you if they’re patient and you can have a lot of conversations, that’s the point. where grammar becomes very useful.
and not only useful, but interesting. because here’s the thing: if I gave you a random grammar explanation about Spanish and you’ve just started learning it, there’s nothing for you to attach it to. it’ll go in one ear and out the other, it’s not interesting.
“I strongly advise beginners not to spend too much time on grammar”
While if you’ve already learned Spanish for quite some time and can say a lot, you just don’t understand the logic, when I explain a rule, it’s like a light bulb goes on in your head. you say, ‘that’s why they say it that way’. that little bit of extra 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 in.
Learning the grammar first is like getting the blueprints for a house when you don’t have any building materials, you know? I like heavy grammar books, but only as an intermediate student. At that stage, I have enough vocabulary, I have enough practice, I can communicate, I just can’t communicate in a sophisticated-sounding way. it’s time to fix things. You don’t tidy up an empty house, you know?
makes sense, thanks. personally, I love grammar. It reminds me of algebra or logic: learning rules and applying them. very satisfying but I have a hard time remembering it later. probably because, as you say, I’ve been doing it too early in the language learning process. Finally, what role does everyday conversation and, perhaps more importantly, immersion in a culture play in reaching the highest levels of proficiency?
well, it really depends on what your goals are 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 example, I have a c2 diploma in Spanish. This is taught by the Cervantes Institute, and it is the highest level of proficiency that can be obtained in a language from this institution. then 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 it.
but realistically, at the level it was before that, let’s say level b2 on the European scale, it was socially equivalent. I could go to the pub with my friends and talk about everything in Spanish like I would in English. that’s not the level of proficiency, but it’s actually more than enough for what a lot of people need. most people do not need to work professionally in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalence in the language. that’s why I would tend to have that end goal for most people, because maybe, yes, you want to be bilingual, have a perfect equivalency, and do everything you can do in English, but we don’t really need to do everything in one second language we need to do in English.
“Most people don’t need to work like professionals in their new language; they just want to have a social equivalence”
sometimes we just need to have an active social life, and that’s an absolutely worthwhile end goal that you can realistically achieve in the space of a year, less if you do it intensively. and this is where I like to go with these languages.
When it comes to reaching a level of mastery, at that stage getting exposure in the conversation doesn’t really help you. there’s only a certain point you’ll get to with the conversation, it won’t help you refine your edges. in that case, my advice is not special. I would just say: ‘you have to study’ because there is nothing magical and there are no shortcuts at this stage. it’s just working hard to refine those edges.
but you can get to the conversational stage in so many fun and interesting ways, which is why I like to advise people to have a dynamic approach to learning. so: practice the conversation as soon as possible, and that will take you to the conversational stage. if you want to be able to read in Spanish too, you have to change your methodology and your whole approach. have more reading built in, and maybe do some more academic stuff. conversation is great, but that’s not all, the end of language learning.
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