by Michael Carroll

Created on: January 19, 2009   Last Updated: March 24, 2010

Those rare individuals with the gift of tongues please feel free to skip this article. For those who struggle with Spanish however, help and encouragement is always welcome.

A rather depressing British Open University program claims that learning a foreign language, as an adult, is an impossible task and therefore motivation has to be a number one priority.

Of course this simply means that any language covers such enormous areas that no one person can acquire total knowledge. This makes sense when we consider all the subsets of language within English. Medicine, science or engineering all require specialized languages which most learners, and even native speakers, can happily ignore.

Fortunately it is somewhat easier to maintain motivational levels with Spanish than many other languages. It is Latin based and widely used. North Americans can often tune in to Spanish language television channels, or buy newspapers, as well as finding people to practice with. Europeans can still take advantage of cheap package holidays to Spain to practice their new found skills.

This gives learners a degree of hope. Explore the reasons for learning and fluency becomes attainable. There is no contradiction here. A person wishing to enhance a holiday by being able to ask for a beer, or a coffee, can become expert in just a few minutes. Within their own needs fluency will have been attained.

Incidentally the Spanish for beer, cerveza, is an extremely useful word to practice until perfect. Each letter is pronounced differently than it's English equivalent and it isn't easy to join them up fluently. C is th, e as in say, r with a very pronounced roll which is particularly difficult for English speakers to master. The v can, confusingly, be pronounced as b and another th gives us the z. Pronounced sloppily cerveza can sound very much like servicios, which is the rest room. Most of us enjoy the beer before searching for the toilets.

A very real difficulty when struggling with a new language is to hear it. As this is a problem that can last for an awful long time it can destroy any enthusiasm, reinforcing negative beliefs about abilities.

Fortunately there are ways to improve this. The simplest being to ask people to speak more slowly. But that often isn't helpful. After all an unknown word is unlikely to become clearer with repeats. It is much more useful to learn how to say that you don't understand and ask what a particular word means. At least then there is a chance to hear alternatives.

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