To Learn Spanish You Can Study or, You Can Get Involved

How To Reduce Memorizing Verbs To Learn Spanish

It amazes me how much we learn about our own language when we learn a foreign tongue.  I fancied myself a bit of an English Language scholar prior to learning Spanish.  I quickly found out how little I knew about my own language.

Do you know what an infinitive verb is?  Check your response.  You’ll likely either fall into the “I never was much at English” group and immediately respond with a “no idea”.  Or you’ll join the larger of the 2 groups and you find yourself looking around your immediate vicinity for that distant faded mental English 101 classroom image that you know you’ve got stored in there and are hoping will pop up with the answer. “Yes I know what an infinitive verb is but… but… just a second….” This stuff challenges us.

For our purposes, an infinitive verb is an action word that is not assigned to a person or time.  Hence, it is infinite.  An infinitive verb is usually preceded by the particle “to” ie. to talk, to eat, to come etc…

All infinitive verbs end in ar, er or ir.  Examples:

• hablar (to talk)
• comer (to eat)
• venir (to come)

The heart and soul of Spanish:
We’re going to take these infinitive verbs and assign them to a person and time. This is called conjugation. To conjugate the verb hablar so that it no longer says “to talk”, which has no time assigned to it, nor a person, we knock the “ar” off and add “o” and so we say “hablo” – I talk.  The time is now, in the present and the person is me – I talk.  “Habla” is he, she or it talks, now in the present.  Hablamos is we talk, now, and hablan is they talk in the present.

This whole idea of using verbs to assign time and person is the concept that trips us English speakers up the most since we really don’t use verbs this way.  I talk, you talk, we talk, they talk – the verb “talk” is unchanged in all cases. We rely on the pronoun preceding the verb to assign the person to the verb. In Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian and others of Latin descent, the verb changes to assign time and person.

The key to learning Spanish:
In my high school we did hours of memorizing verb conjugations, which is the reason I stopped, and why many others stopped as well.  Memorizing is an awful way to learn Spanish, or any other language.  Here’s the key to learning to speak Spanish – get involved with the language.  What do I mean by get involved?

I will share with you some concepts that I have seen truly help a lot of people who either want to learn Spanish, or who have tried, or are trying and are frustrated.  The initial concepts will require some memorizing, but the memorization is minimized to enable you to get involved with the language so that, as you go through your days here in Costa Rica, you can seek out opportunities to expose yourself to the language, and allow that language absorbing brain of yours to sort out the tangled web that the language seems to be at first.

When we first hear a foreign language, it sounds like one long word.  As we grow accustomed to the sounds of the language the words start to separate and we can start to identify them even without knowing what the words mean.  An interesting excersize is to listen to your own language, perhaps a conversation in your family, or among friends, or at the grocery store.  Don’t listen to the meaning of the conversation, just listen to the sound of the language.  English is exactly the same way.  It is one long word with the occasional pause – and this might even not be in between words but in the middle of a word!

This allowing the brain to separate the words out is purely a function of our brain starting to get accustomed to the language.  We want to expose our brains as much as we can to the language so that it can sort out how verbs are conjugated, how sentences are constructed, adjectives used etc… 

Two ways to learn a language:

1. Study
2. Conversationally (get involved)

In my time of speaking Spanish I think that I passed the halfway point a long time ago with what I learned by study and what I learned conversationally, which is how we learned our native tongue as babies.  I find that the Spanish that I learned by study is the Spanish that I have more of an academic understanding of.  Spanish that is learned conversationally is different.  Sometimes we don’t even readily know the English equivalent of a Spanish term. The Spanish that I have learned conversationally isn’t as accessible since I didn’t go through the translation phase with learning it.

The way a language works:
We pick up a fork and ask someone, how do you say fork in Spanish?  “Tenedor” is the answer.  Now, in your head, “tenedor” means the word in your native tongue “fork” which means that object that we use for eating. 

Here’s another way of  learning that word.  Let’s say that no one tells you that “fork” is “tenedor” in Spanish.  And let’s say you are eating a meal with a Spanish family and someone at the table drops their fork on the floor and the mother hops up and makes a fuss about getting a new one, and you hear the word “tenedor” repeated in obvious reference to the eating utensil.  Chances are you’ll directly associate the sound of the word “tenedor” with the object, without going through your native tongue equivalent of “fork”.  You may never translate the word “tenedor” in your brain again.  It may well just always mean the object.  If not at first, then sometime shortly thereafter. And this is because you took the brave step of having a meal with a Spanish speaking family.  In other words, you got involved with the language.

Coming up next, the few verbs that you need to memorize to help you get involved with Spanish.