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Those rare individuals with the gift of tongues please feel free to skip this article. For the rest of us, struggling with Spanish, help and encouragement is always welcome.

A rather depressing British Open University program says that learning a foreign language is an impossible task so motivation is a top priority before attempting to do so.

Of course this simply means that any language covers such enormosu 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 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 new 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. Every letter must be pronounced differently and it isn't easy to join them up fluently. Pronounced sloppily it can sound very much like servicios, which are 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 a word that is outside your current vocabulary 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.

Try to describe the word you want. This only highlights the need to be flexible in your own understanding. Practice saying things in different ways. For example if you don't know the word for carrot could you express it in a different way? A long, thin, orange vegetable would probably

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