Teach Yourself Spanish: Creating Effective Routines

When you want to teach yourself Spanish, there are three ways you must prepare yourself.  The first is to prepare yourself mentally.  The second is to know what you are doing.  The third is to create effective routines.  Intention and knowledge are not enough.  They must be applied in regular practice.  But the practice must make sense and systematically move you toward your goals.  Since there are 5 primary areas that are involved when you learn Spanish, your practice needs to cover them all. 

1. Review is your best friend.  It is the primary way you insure material is retained and goes into long-term memory.  It is not enough to look at the vocabulary and grammar you learned.  You must actively stimulate your recall.  Test yourself.  Every day and with everything you have learned.  Cover up the Spanish and mentally retrieve the Spanish.  It is more difficult and more effective to do than covering the English.  You can’t guess: you have to actually remember the Spanish words or grammar point.  5 minutes are enough.  Every time you do this, it will reinforce what you previously learned.  So the only review worth doing is to test your recall.  You can do it in both directions.
2.  Be very systematic when you learn new material.  First explore to get an overall idea of the new vocab or the new grammar points.
3.  Secondly, make sure you can recreate the grammar or retrieve the new words.  This can be done very slowly, while you test your short term memory.  
4.  Thirdly, you need to practice the new grammar or vocabulary intensively so it becomes automatic.
5.  Make sure you listen to your Spanish language program, some Spanish recordings, podcasts, media or live conversations daily.  You brain must become used to hearing the language in order to recognize what it hears. 
   
6.  Talk to yourself every day.   Organize some topics that are of interest to you and practice them often.  Your fluency will automatically increase.

This has been a very cursory overview of the effective routines you want to create for yourself.  If you have any questions or comments, contact me on this blog.  You can also visit my site focus language.com.  Good luck creating your own routines as you teach yourself Spanish.

Also visit  Intensive French and Spanish Page

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