Best language learning advice

The best advice for daily language learning wasn't the most important, but the easiest to implement.

Meet la maestra

I have a wonderful language teacher, Alejandra - she lives about 5 minutes from where we live, is a Uruguayan through and through, and she’s a great match for our family. She helps us with so much more than learning Spanish, she’s helping us learn the area and its history, the native plants, visit new places, and she even helped us get some trees removed from our yard after a storm!

Alejandra’s first advice, which is truly the most important, is to use your new language every day.

You’re building new muscles to make new sounds, learning new patterns of speech, practicing pronunciation and accent, and if you’re speaking with other people, you're building recall skills.

The advice that helped me right away

But something else she recommended really helped me with necessary vocabulary - keeping a simple daily journal in Spanish. It only takes about 10 minutes, and you can use one or more of these few sentences to guide you:

- Talk about where you went.
- Say what you did.
- Describe how you felt.

Use your dictionary (or translator) to find the words you need, and write them in your journal the way you would say them to your friend. If you went to the vet to see why your dog was itching their ears, you’ll look up and start to memorize more of the words you need to discuss your oídos de perro next time you go to el veterinario. You get bonus points (practice) if you read them out loud a few times.

How I make it part of my day

At the beginning of the year, I found a very inexpensive Spanish-language day planner, which was just enough space to write a paragraph about the day, and also has the names of the day and month en español. This is where I keep my journal, and I share recents entries with my teacher during class so she can help me update words that aren’t used here in Uruguay, or maybe I tried some sentence structure that works in English, but isn’t quite right en español. So some of my pages have corrections, which is kind of cute for a journal. But these small corrections are what make my friends and neighbors here turn their heads when I start using them.

At different times in my life, I have read about and aspired to work on “morning pages” whether it be to get ahead at work, to meet writing goals, or to journal for mental health. While I don’t do the journal every day (some days I’m just home doing the same wonderfully boring things, part of why we moved here) I do find it’s been the easiest and most motivating way to keep up with pages.

I'd love to hear your ideas

What’s your favorite way to practice your new language? An easy way to share, fill out my form!

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