More on learning Spanish

Elsewhere I've talked about learning Spanish, and after nearly two years of working on it, I'm still not particularly fluent. (Okay, I'm not really fluent at all.) But re-reading this post on Michael Caine and line learning linked a bit with my recent attempts at fluency. 

The challenge has been not just to remember the words I want to say in Spanish but to translate my English thoughts into Spanish in the first place. Both Gabriel Wymer (in my favourite book on language learning: Fluent Forever) and various other language teachers talk about needing to start thinking in Spanish rather than shifting over ideas from English to Spanish. It's a kind of mental trick, I suspect: the brain has to decide that the language it's been learning forever isn't the only language it can think in. 

Well, I haven't found thinking in Spanish at all easy, but earlier this week the idea occurred to me that my brain doesn't really has any deposit of Spanish, in terms of whole sentences. There are heaps of words and the Anki cards I use - Gabriel Wyner's much-promoted method - have plenty of sentences, but I read these rather than memorising them. 

After I came back to Wyner's book a while ago I began to try and memorise some Spanish rather than just translating it, and started with things I already knew in English - like the Psalms, for instance. This helped a bit, but it was slow progress. 

What my idea the other day involved was not trying to learn a whole thing in Spanish, but to take random sentences from my Anki cards, list them out, and memorise them. In the process this gives my tongue actual fluency in speaking Spanish, and I start to think more in Spanish. Yes, it's in the smallest way possible, perhaps, but then, as children we learn in the smallest way possible. It's only because we're surrounded by native speakers night and day that we build up our vocabulary and eventually start speaking in our native language: perfectly, and grammatically. All without apparent effort. 

Okay, I can't mimic that process completely but I can throw myself into a kind of not particularly deep end and memorise sentences. In themselves they make sense to me in Spanish, and they're not just isolated words, but connected groups of words, such as Un viejo puente cruza por encima de la via del tren, pero el puente no lleva a ninguna parte. (This is a sentence I'm memorising today, for instance.) Holding that group of words together in my head, along with a number of others, means I start to see connections in how things are said, and better, I retain these connections.

Yup, it might sound a bit out of the way in terms of fluency. But I've already got ten sentences under my belt, and have seen connections I hadn't previously noticed, and I'm now on my second list of ten. Early days, but I feel confident that some further step in the process is now in progress.

One other thing: this process means I'm speaking the language more than I would otherwise. Yes, of course with Duolingo part of the learning process was speaking words and sentences out loud, but then I would immediately forget them once I'd done the exercise. I needed something that means I retain what I'm speaking - even if for the time being, it's a random sentence. In due course these random sentences will make more and more connections. I believe. Time will tell!