In my experience as a Spanish language teacher, here are three mistakes that can make you waste precious time, ruin your confidence and eventually give up. As you will see, they are easy to avoid:
1. Rushing through your first Spanish lessons
Having a sound knowledge of the basics will determine how fast, and how well, you can learn Spanish.
If you’re a complete beginner, concentrate on each and every lesson of your course, from the beginning, for as long as you need. Do not rush yourself. If a lesson takes you three hours, so be it, but never allow yourself to skip any material.
Basically, the more time you put into the first lessons, the faster you’ll be able to learn later on.
If you’re past the beginners’ level but have some gaps in your knowledge, stop learning new material and go back to the beginning. This may sound drastic, boring, defeating or simply mad, but it will work wonders and no doubt boost your confidence in no time.
To succeed, follow this routine: review all the words you have learned so far. Make sure you understand all the grammar you have covered. Do not allow yourself to make more than one mistake per exercise or drill. Listen to the dialogs until you can say them out loud along with the recordings.
Remember: small gaps at the beginning become enormous holes by lesson twelve. By lesson twenty, giving up will feel like the only way out.
2. Not focusing on the Spanish pronunciation
Working on your pronunciation might not be the obvious thing to do as a beginner, but it has many great advantages:
- The better your pronunciation is, the better you’ll be able to understand native speakers.
- Having a good accent is hugely rewarding and motivating.
- Having a good accent from the start also allows you to avoid bad pronunciation habits that aren’t always easy to get rid of.
The best way to improve your pronunciation is to concentrate on one letter of the alphabet at a time, and then on words you’re having difficulty with. To get a good Spanish accent, make sure you learn only from native Spanish speakers.
Acquiring a very good accent requires patience and perseverance, no doubt, but once you start working on it you’ll notice some improvement almost from the start. Guaranteed!
3. Learning Spanish nouns without ‘el’ or ‘la’
Whenever you learn a Spanish noun with its article, you’re avoiding endless future mistakes. In other words, you’re saving yourself a lot of time and unnecessary, repetitive work.
As you may know, the Spanish gender rules can help you ‘guess’ the gender of many words, especially those ending in ‘a’ and ‘o’, but there are many nouns that will let you down if you try to guess their gender. That’s why it’s safer, and faster, to learn them all with their article when you first come across them.
The good news is that any good Spanish course gives you every new noun with its article.
Warning: Unfortunately, there are many Spanish courses that still teach nouns without their article. To avoid wasting your time, make sure the Spanish course you get gives you the new vocabulary with ‘el’ and ‘la’. The simplest way to do it is by checking the free lessons before buying the full product. If there are no sample lessons, get a different course!
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Hola! I'm Maria Fernandez, an experienced native Spanish teacher, author of the Spanish courses at Spanish Bookworld & the popular Spanish Podcasts for Beginners on iTunes.
