Nix the English, amigo.

Why am I still writing these posts in English, you may ask?  Fair question.  First, this blog would become much more of a chore than a delight for me.  Mistakes in writing are much more glaring than those made during spoken conversation.  Second, it would take hours for me to complete each post.  At this point in my learning, even expressing a simple thought in Spanish requires a lot of looking up words and checking to see if my grammar structures are even half-way on the mark.  Writing this blog completely in Spanish, however, is a long-range goal.  Even now, I try to intersperse Spanish words and phrases into my text when appropriate.

Una taza de té

Now, oral Spanish, that's a whole different taza de té.  After performing a little research and some experimentation, I've concluded that once you've learned most of the most frequently used Spanish words and the rudiments of the grammar, it's important to remove as much English as possible from your daily practice.  English just interfere and keeps you in the thinking process of that language.  At first I thought the solution to this was to watch Spanish movies and TV without subtitles, but after months of that technique, I'm beginning to doubt the efficacy of such an approach.  I'd usually end up grasping only a word or phrase here and there and felt that the progress I was making was negligible.  Then I discovered several resources that teach conversational Spanish in a different way:  No English from the very start.  Some of these courses used subtitles, but the subtitles were in Spanish, never in English.

One of the best of the online options for using this method is the series 'Extra en español.'  You can watch it for free on YouTube and here's a sample:  Extra en espanol episode.  This one uses Spanish subtitles and the Spanish is spoken a little slowly and very distinctly.  The real selling point for this series, though, is that it is utterly charming.  Well acted by attractive and charismatic Spanish actors, it's sort of a Spanish 'Three's Company.'  No, nobody is gay in the series, but the two female flat-sharers are hiding an American man (not allowed by  their apartment manager).  As I said, the male character is not gay, but he does have a cute 'bromance' going on with the handsome next-door neighbor.  Too bad that there are only about a dozen episodes, I'm enjoying it and feel that it has helped me leaps and bounds with my comprehension.  

Another site that uses a similar approach is a MOOC produced by the University of Salamanca.  It's a series of videos that also portray an American who is visiting Spain.  It's also very entertaining and even though it does not use any subtitles, anyone who has the very basics of Spanish can understand at least 90% of the conversations.  It also has short grammar lessons interspersed in the lessons.  Not convinced that you want be completely at sea and won't understand a word they're saying?  Give it a try: Capitulo Dos .  Cuidado!  You may get addicted.  (PS:  They also have similar classes in Italian and, I think, other languages).