30-Day Spanish Conversation Leap Challenge

If you are thinking about learning a second language, there are several myths that you will have to deal with on your journey. 

Instant Spanish: The first, and most seductive, is that you can do it in 10 minutes a day, or in 30 days or 1 month or 3 months. Spanish is the language I’m learning, and I have been sucked into a lot of those “get fluent fast" sites. The optimist in me always wonders though: Maybe there is a magic bullett … ?

That thought led me to an entertaining example: Spanish in a month, a video by Connor Grooms, a 20-ish digital nomad. His 29.20 minute documentary had 1,382,222 views before I watched it. He admits that he has an addiction to learning things in a month … from learning how to be a DJ in Prague to adding 26 pounds of muscle mass in a month. 

Obviously, there is a generation (or two) gap here 

but I’m prepared to be open-minded.

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At the beginning of his documentary, he tells us he is Medellin, Columbia, where he is "going to do the same with Spanish.” I translate that as “learn Spanish in 30 days” and am intrigued. I’ve been studying pretty seriously for over a year and definitely seriously for three months (to say nothing of the 42 ways I've failed to learn Spanish over the last several decades). If there’s a more effective way to study, I want to know about it.

Connor tells us where he is with Spanish but it goes by so quickly that it’s easy to miss. He is NOT a beginning Spanish student. He says his aim is to be functionally conversational and you might think, “Wow! Functionally conversational in a month. I want that!”

However, he goes on to say, “I can have friends who speak no English and get by fine and have normal conversations. But, I’m not perfect and there are some words I don’t know.”

Squealing brakes sound in my brain.

WHAT?!! You can have normal conversations and get by fine? There are only some words you don’t know? 

I am still at that ugly, stuttering stage where all the words I know are racing to be first into the conversation funnel, pushing each other aside, clamoring to make themselves heard while the person in front of me stares, waiting for that first drip of comprehensible language. “Muy bien,” I finally reply. Arrrrggggghhhh!

NOTICE: I wrote all of the above before I decided that,

 in the interest of being open-minded,

I would watch ALL of this man-child’s video.

Sometimes, life turns on a dime.

Connor’s  first step is to ask for advice from experts such as Benny Lewis, well-known polyglot. Well, that’s a good place to start and it makes me wonder who I should be seeking advice from. Bookmark that thought for later.

    Benny Lewis’s advice sets my teeth on edge: “Don’t worry about grammar or conjugation, just express yourself."

How am I supposed to express myself without verbs which have all those conjugations? How can I even tell someone I feel happy if I don’t know how to say "me siento feliz”?  I guess I could jump up and down with a big smile on my face and scream “feliz! … feliz!” There is a limit to my open-mindedness.

However, as Benny continues, he goes on with the idea of not worrying about correct Spanish, but just finding a way to say something. His example is “Today I to write, Yesterday I to write, Tomorrow I to write.” Definitely not correct but probably would be understood, and requires only five words … yo (I) hoy (today), ayer (yesterday), mañana (tomorrow) and escribir (to write). 

This makes me pause for a moment as I get a glimmer of the idea. I am learning a lot of verbs and often stumble over finding the right conjugation. I could default to the infinitive like escribir. Hmmm.

Benny goes on with two other recommendations: make flashcards with Anki of all the words you learn every day, and find online tutors that fit your level and style. I think flashcards with images work better than just Spanish/English words but the idea of doing them DAILY implies a discipline that fits the “Spanish in a month” concept. I do believe the early stages of language study is about building relevant vocabulary. You have to have something to talk about. 

Principle: collect relevant vocabulary daily and use flashcards, with images. 

Principle: you need a tutor, pick carefully and consider an online tutor.

So, Connor finds a teacher he can work with in person. Interesting that the teacher immediately teaches him a bit of grammar … how to make the future tense by using “Voy a plus the infinitive.” So, now instead of “Tomorrow I to write,” Connor can say “Voy a escribir.” So much for ignoring grammar.

The next part of Connor’s documentary is brilliant. He has a roadmap. I don’t know if he created the map as part of his month or before he started, but this is golden. In one of my beginning Spanish classes, we learned the word for helicopter. Just how often would I use helicopter in a conversation in any language? Waste of time for me since I’m not interested in helicopters. My vocabulary lists comes from the words I meet every day, words I want to know and use, or from the materials I read. 

Principle: create a roadmap of what to learn when.

Connor devotes a good portion of his study time to pronunciation, something I believe receives too little attention. What I’ve found, for me at least, is that being able to hear the language is the most difficult part of learning it. If we aren’t pronouncing a word correctly to ourselves, we won’t recognize it when someone else says it. Great principle. 

Principle: learn how to pronounce the sounds of the language.

To get the help he needs with pronunciation, Connor goes to Idahosa Ness, founder of the Mimic Method, and someone new to me. Within a few minutes of exploring the Mimic Method website and video, I knew this was one of my missing pieces.

Maybe this could be where I learn how to make Spanish sounds and develop the ability to understand the language. Price: $297. This open-mindedness could get expensive.

The next expert Connor connects with is Brian Kwong of Add1Challenge, a program I recently learned about which promises that you will be able to hold a 15-minute conversation in your target language within 90 days. It only opens the challenges periodically and the next one opens April 21. Price: $197.

Brian schools Connor on adding accountability to his program. “If there’s nothing at stake, you can just say, ‘Oh, I didn’t do it.” Brian says that some people are motivated by pain, some by rewards, and asks Connor what motivates him.

Connor says he would need the threat of a major sting and offers to pay Brian $500 any day he doesn’t follow through with his commitment. 

Wow! Would I  put $500 on the line for every day I don’t do what I say I will do? Wait! If I do what I say I’m going to do, it wouldn’t cost me anything.

Okay … so let’s say I actually do this thing that is forming like a storm cloud on the horizon. Let’s say, I form a 30-day plan and use the Add1Challenge as a goal: have a 15-minute conversation with a native Spanish speaker at the end of the 30-days.

What would hold my feet to the fire? What if I agreed to donate $500 to a favorite charity any day I didn’t complete my agreement? Hmmmm.

However, Brian takes it a step further. “Tell everyone.” Tell everyone about the challenge. Yuck!

At Day 14, Connor has a milestone conversation with someone. His performance in that conversation makes me wonder if his initial assessment that he could have conversations with non-English speakers might have been a bit overstated. I had some difficulty with the Columbian accent, but I could have held my own in that conversation. (She says forgetting the attack of the butterflies that happens every time she actually tries to have a conversation.)

The idea of having periodic milestones and being able to recognize and test progress is a great one.

And, if one is going for conversational fluency, the milestones should be related to conversations. I also want to read Spanish poetry and literature so there could be a milestone related to that also.

Part of the way through Connor’s challenge, he finds that he needs more vocabulary building and shifts his challenge to spending more time on vocabulary upfront and shifts some of his pronunciation to later in the month. All done in conversation with Brian Kwong to avoid breaking his commitment to the challenge … and losing $500. He emphasizes using a spaced-repetition flashcard system to enhance his vocabulary memory.

Heartwarming. At about minute 21 in the video, Connor starts talking about how hard and frustrating the project is, not only mentally but physically. “I under-estimated how physically exhausting all this studying and speaking would be. I find that almost every day I have to take a nap for two hours.”

An amazing late night scene on the last day of the challenge brings Connor to the realization that he owes Brian $500.

Is this a failure? No, it just added to the cost of the project. And, who knows how much better his performance was throughout the project because of that potential threat. Without it, he might have done far less well.

At Connor’s final conversation, the test of the project, he listens more than he speaks but he understands the gist of the conversation and his pronunciation is good. The man he is talking with generously calls him advanced and capable of having conversations with native speakers.

In the ending, Connor encourages viewers, saying they can do what he did, that he is not special, he just put in the time, about 150 hours in his 30-day project. His message: put in the time, learn the most useful grammar and vocabulary first and focus on communication. He closes with:

    

        “You don’t need a better piece of software … 

you need to talk with a real human."

My takeaway: I want to do a 30-day challenge. I want to make a leap in my Spanish abilities. In order to do this, I need to develop a roadmap of what I need to learn and a doable daily schedule. I need a series of milestones to test my progress as well as a “stake in the game.”  

I need to make a commitment to daily conversation and who those conversations will be with. 😢 I need to take the Mimic Method course and maybe the Add1Challenge ($494).

The month of May is open. It is a hot month that makes me want to stay inside. I could be ready by then.  

I have recently set up a Spanish learning blog … Aventura Español … falling in love with Mexico while learning Spanish. This would be a great place to monitor my accountability. I have a perfect tutor found on italki … he could be part of this. 

30-day Spanish Leap Challenge

Will I do it? 
Surely, if a 20-year-old geek with a job can do it,
a 73-year-old, life-wise retiree can, too.
Stay tuned.

Summary of principles:

Principle: collect vocabulary daily and use flashcards, with images. 

Principle: you need a tutor, pick carefully and consider an online tutor.

Principle: study relevant vocabulary using a spaced-repetition flashcard system

Principle: create a roadmap of what to learn when. 

Principle: learn how to pronounce the sounds of the language.

Principle: develop periodic milestones

Here are two other posts about principles of learning a language: 

Principles of Learning a Language
15 Simple ideas for studying Spanish

Start Here on your journey to learning Spanish

Learning Principles

(Principios de aprendizaje)

Regardless of what program, school or approach you take to learning Spanish, I think you’ll find these principles helpful.

• Know why you want to learn Spanish.
  

- Do you just need enough to recognize signs and travel safely and comfortably? 

- Do you want to talk to your neighbors and service people?

- Do you want to understand the culture and have life conversations with Spanish speakers?

- Do you want to read great Spanish literature and write poetry in Spanish?

- Do you want to work as a translator?

Each of these requires a different level of commitment and effort. Decide on the level that's right for you.

• Acquire language; don’t translate.

Break your reliance on English (or your native language). Translation is a cold, mechanical way to get from one language to another. It loses the richness that comes with acquiring a language with all its cultural uniqueness.

 Watching Spanish movies and videos with English subtitles is an exercise in translation and a very slow way to learn as your brain automatically tunes out stuff it doesn’t understand. YouTube and some videos allow you to change the subtitles to Spanish which gives you a chance to hear the language and see the connected words.  … However, most computer-generated subtitles are bad. Period. A punto. 

Idea: Take a 3-5 minute Spanish audio segment with a Spanish transcript. Look up the words you don’t know, write them down on your Word List then follow this process: Listen, read the transcript. Repeat as needed until you can listen to the segment and understand it. Try some of the stories in The Spanish Experiment for a fun way to move toward acquiring the language.

• Create a plan that fits YOUR goals and YOUR life.

Like everything else that requires time and effort, having a plan and sticking to it is more effective than waiting for the urge to study or practice. Make sure it’s your plan. Rather than just putting a 60-minute block of time on your calendar, you might want to break it up into the main components of learning a language: listening, speaking (or recording yourself speaking), reading, writing, reviewing your word list or practicing pronunciation and ear training. Every day doesn’t have to be the same … it’s your plan; do it your way.

• Get a coach.

Regardless of how disciplined you are, it helps to have someone in your corner rooting for you, giving you feedback, showing you better ways to accomplish your goals. Fortunately in our electronic world, it’s easy to find exactly the right coach for you. Italki is an amazing resource for finding teachers or just people to talk to, if that’s what you want. 

When I finally realized that classes weren’t working for me, I reached out to find a private teacher. The first one didn’t work out but when I went to iTalki, I found dozens of teachers that met my specifications. I wanted someone from Mexico who had good English. I’m one of those people who needs to know why something is the way it is and someone who understands English can really help me over some of those hurdles. Most of the teachers have videos so you can get a sense of them long before you connect with them in person. 

I found a great candidate and scheduled a half hour Skype session. We mainly talked in English so I could express what I was looking for. It turned we were in sync and I am finding our sessions invaluable … at $11 per hour with no travel time or costs, that’s an amazing value.

• Engage your visual memory.
  

Confucius was right … hear and forget, see and remember, do and understand. That should be our mantra. Build your vocabulary with pictures rather than English words (translation). It may take a bit longer, but you’ll remember far more. Plus it’s really fun and creative.

Idea: Enter a Spanish word in Google and then click “images.” You’ll get hundreds (or thousands) of images. Choose one that matches your idea of what the word means. Look at the image, say the Spanish word out loud while you look at the image. Repeat. Come back a day later and repeat again … then 3 days later. When you review your Word Lists, you’ll have images flying into your mind easily. If an image gets lost, go back and renew it.

• Build a relevant vocabulary.

People will tell you to “just start talking” … and that’s okay if you want to say “buenos dias” a lot and make a bunch of hand gestures. (You can actually carry on a pretty intricate conversation with hand gestures … if that’s what you want.)

If you actually want to communicate with words, you’re going to need some to work with. It’s something of a dance … a few words, some verbs in present tense, a dash of grammar, a few more words and verbs, another tense and so on. It helps if the words you learn early on are common words relative to what you might have conversations about. You will use the word perro far more often than you’ll use helicóptero (which was in one of my beginning classes.)

Learn the words you want to use and you’ll pick up a lot of others along the way.

• Listen every day and everywhere.

If you’re in a Spanish-speaking country or area, eavesdrop in coffee shops and on the streets. Listen to songs on YouTube that play the lyrics with the song. Repeat short segments until you understand them rather than long podcasts or movies. Listening with meaning and relevance is where language starts.

• Speak Spanish out loud every day … even if it’s just to yourself.

It’s not enough to “know” Spanish … you have to speak it and be able to hear it. Most beginning classes teach you how to ask a question in Spanish. But, what do you do when a flood of sounds returns as the answer to your question? In order to actually acquire a language, you have to be able to hear it and verbalize the sounds of it. 

This is not as easy as it sounds. Unless you’ve had voice training (and ear training), many sounds may sound the same to you but very different to native speakers. If you’re ready to speak to other people, great. If not, speak or read to yourself … out loud. When you speak or read out loud, you are training your tongue and mouth to form the new sounds, and also training your ears to hear the sounds.

Idea: Find short, simple Spanish paragraphs and record yourself speaking them. Ideally, find paragraphs that have been spoken or read by a native speaker and then compare your sounds with theirs.

• Read every day … out loud, of course.

Most vocabulary comes from reading. Read anything that interests you, starting with short pieces. It can be exhausting to try to wade through a long piece in a new language when you have to look up many of the words. Read everything you can find … street signs, advertisements, menus, event announcements, museum exhibits. If there’s too much to read at any one time, take a photo and read it later. (Even if you don’t read it immediately, you’ll have something relevant to read when you are ready.)

• Write every day.

The last part of Confucius’s wise words is: I do and I understand. Writing sentences about your every day life using words you’re learning is a way to embed the words in your memory and begin the process of creating coherent communication. Writing about your life, your day, your interests guarantees that the language you are acquiring is relevant and memorable.

• Get instant feedback.

The learning process is a feedback loop. Do something, get feedback, make adjustments, do it again and repeat. Nothing is wrong; it just hasn’t been looped enough to be right. 

Fortunately, the internet gives us a lot of feedback mechanisms. One of my favorites is the Google Two-Step. Google Translate is not always right … but it’s more right than most of us beginning language learners.

Idea: Google Two-Step.

Write something in Spanish and put it into Google Translate: You are intelligent and beautiful. … Eres inteligente y hermosa.

When you put the Spanish in, you will be given the English translation. If it says what you were intending to say, it’s a good sign that you are close. But, not always. To check yourself. Copy the English into the left box and change the language to English.

When the English produces the same result you wrote, then you can be reasonably sure you were right. A lot of the time though, you’ll get a different Spanish version and that’s where your learning spikes as you figure out why you’re getting a different way of saying what you want to say. As we said, Google Translate is not always right but it’s a good teacher.

• Consistent, short study periods.

There has been a lot written about brain plasticity in recent years and it’s a great boon to those of us of a certain age. It means the brain continues to learn and make new connections … when it needs to. Given new input and called upon to respond to new stimulus, it does. It takes awhile though and whatever the “new” is needs to be consistent. And studies show that frequent, small doses of new is better than marathon exposures infrequently repeated. Cramming might have worked in college but in the world of language learning, slow is actually faster.

In the beginning of learning a new language, active, focused study time is important. Most experts recommend 30 - 60 minutes a day. Breaking that up into 10-15 minutes focused on different aspects of the learning process gives the brain a workout without reaching exhaustion.