Best way to learn Spanish as an adult

Aren’t languages supposed to be learned as kids? Is it too late for me? Am I too “old”? As a Spanish tutor who has worked with over 50 adults, I can guarantee you this: you can learn Spanish at ANY age. Our brain is literally wired for learning languages. We are “social animals”; meaning, as our survival depends on our community and our ability to communicate, our brains have an intrinsic skill to learn languages. 

It’s perfectly doable, but I’m not gonna lie: to learn Spanish as an adult is a completely different experience than learning as a kid. So here are five crucial methods to overcome the challenges that comes with adulthood: 

1. Save a time and respect your schedule

The main obstacle to learn Spanish as an adult ––or any other language–– is making the time. 

For most people, school was pretty much our only obligation as kids. But as a grown-up, you have to juggle your work, the kids, making dinner every night, walking the dog… all on top with saving time to study and practice. 

It will be challenging to set the rhythm at first. But I can guarantee you once you settle your routine, the rest of it will go more smoothly. 

To achieve it, I highly recommend you two tips:

• Choose a time. Set aside time for Spanish and stick to it. For instance, every Tuesday at 5 PM; every Friday at 8 AM… Whatever works for you, but reserve time. Even send you an invite in your Google Calendar to not overlap anything else.

Treat it as any other work meeting. You wouldn’t miss your meetings just because you wanted to sleep one more hour, would you? Well, do the same thing with your Spanish lesson. Stick to it! If you don’t, and just wait to see when you have free time (if you ever have), it’s easy to keep putting it off and say, «I’ll do it tomorrow», “I’ll start next week”, and then never get around to it. Once again, if you set a specific time every week, it becomes part of your routine. Pretty soon it’ll become as normal as setting aside time to have dinner.

• If your work it’s unpredictable, do it before your workday begins. Work is often unpredictable —sometimes meetings are scheduled at the end of the day, emergencies come up, or there are periods with a heavy workload that make you stay late. If that’s your case, if you are not in full control of your time, do your Spanish studying BEFORE your workday starts. This way, you’re more likely to actually do it and not keep putting it off.

2. Ask your family or closest friends for help

They say it takes a village to raise a kid. Well, with Spanish or any other languages, it’s pretty much the same. The more help you get, the smoother and more successful the process will be.

Ask your “village” for help. Ask your partner to quiz you on your new vocabulary list. Tell your kids or co-workers you’ll be studying Spanish at that time of the day so they can keep it in mind in their calendars. Tell your friends & family you’re learning Spanish so they can encourage you.

As I said in the first point, the main obstacle to learning as an adult is juggling with all your other obligations. Having other people supporting your goal definitely helps!

3. Practice conversations; not just memorizing words

Most language books or most teachers at high school focus on exercises such as filling up the blank space, true or false questions, crossword puzzles, etc. While they can be a good tool to memorize new vocabulary, that’s not how the real world works. When facing an actual conversation with a Spanish speaker, you’ll literally have to talk. No one will show you multiple options to choose your correct answer like in Duolingo. 

A lot of my students have carried out that “study method” with them; they are used to only memorizing the words and “spitting them out” in a test. My piece of advice is: don’t just memorize them. Create conversation scripts with them.

For instance, a common exercise we do during class is to create five different conversations with the vocabulary we just review.: 

Conversation 1: 

• ¡Hola! ¿Cómo estás? 

• Bien, gracias. ¿Y tú? 

• También, gracias. Bueno, luego nos vemos. 

Conversation 2:

• Buenos días. 

• Buenas. ¿Todo bien? 

• Todo bien. Gracias. Oye, perdón, me tengo que ir, pero luego nos vemos. 

Instead of just repeating a vocabulary list out loud, you are tailoring a script that makes sense. You’re applying the phrases into a real-life scenario mock.   This is the only way you’ll actually be able to learn another language. Practicing real-life scenarios rather than high school-books exercises. 

In my classes you’ll have access to these kinds of exercises. But if you’re studying on your own, try to do the same. Choose that new world you just learned at Duolingo and try to make a sentence with it.

4. Don’t try to fit everything into English (or your native language) 

When we’re adults, we’re already used to our way of living. That includes our language: its sounds, our daily basis phrases, slangs, our idioms. But when it comes to learning another language, sometimes you’ll not have the exact same expression. Sometimes Spanish uses a different verb, a different saying… For instance, in English you “throw a party”, but in Spanish, we use the verb “make”. You “make a party” (hacer una fiesta).  

My piece of advice is try not to translate it in your mind literally, otherwise you will get confused. With languages you’ll have to go with the equivalent most of the time instead of the literal translation from your native language. 

5. Celebrate your small victories

Once again, the challenging part of learning Spanish as an adult is not mainly the technical aspect. (In fact, Spanish is actually one of the easiest languages to learn if you’re an English native speaker. In this post, I explain why). 

The most challenging part is the soft skills needed to achieve it: being patient enough, persistent enough, committed enough. 

To keep yourself motivated, I highly recommend you to celebrate your small victories. That one word you were struggling with, but you can finally pronounce it smoothly. That one verb you just kept forgetting over and over, but you finally get it. The time you could actually talk with a Spanish speaker (it doesn’t matter how small the conversation was). These “small” but significant steps will be your reminder of how much you’re progressing, and we’ll keep you more engaged with the process. 

Conclusions: 

A lot of people think languages are something you only learn as a baby, and the more time passes by, the more you lose that ability. That’s a complete lie. Our brains never stop learning. So don’t get discouraged in your journey to learn Spanish! You got this!

In case you need help or you’d like private sessions with a native Spanish speaker, check them out!