Learning Spanish – Part 3 – Taking Your First Steps
Wednesday, June 16th, 2010In the last article I talked about mental preparation. If you are thinking about learning Spanish then it makes sense to think carefully about what you hope to achieve and how you hope to achieve it. This is because the learning process is likely to be a long one and full of trials and tribulations. It is wise not to underestimate yourself.
In this article I’m going to talk about what I did when I was first thinking about learning Spanish. That was about four years ago now. At the time I knew nothing of the Spanish language, so for me it was a case of starting right from the very beginning.
My concepts of how other languages worked were really very basic. I thought all I had to do was to take any English word and simply learn what the equivalent word in Spanish was. Therefore I could simply put the words together and hey presto I would have a complete sentence. It didn’t’ take me long to realise that this basic theory rarely works!
For example, “I always buy strong coffee”. In Spanish, ” siempre compro café fuerte”. In this sentence there appears to be no Spanish word for “I” and the word for “coffee (café)” comes before the word for “strong (fuerte)”. This is only a simple example but it shows how my basic theory falls down. The Spanish word for “I” is “yo”, but it is often not used in Spanish sentences because the construction of the verb it is used with already tells us that “I” is being referred to “compro = I buy”. Secondly, in Spanish, adjectives usually come after the nouns that they are used with whereas in English they usually come before them. “strong coffee = café fuerte”.
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