Which Approach To Learning Spanish Is Best?
Posted on April 3, 2010
Filed Under Learn Spanish Online | 1 Comment
Let’s face it: over the next several decades, demographic shifts will make being able to speak Spanish more and more important. It is estimated that by the year 2050, hispanic speakers will be the most populous ethnic group in the United States. Even if you won’t need to learn to speak Spanish in your lifetime, your children and grand-children most definitely will.
Which Approach Is Most Effective?
There are a wide variety of popular approaches to language learning in general and Spanish learning in particular. Newer methodologies such as the Pimsleur approach and Rosetta Stone (due to cost, I’d probably try to buy a used Rosetta Stone copy instead of a new one) have been winning a lot of converts of late. Are they worth the cost?
Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, while they have a lot of differences, share pretty much the same primary learning methodology. The idea is that you learn a new language best the same way you learned your native language as a child, namely through repetition in a variety of natural contexts. The theory is that while memorizing sentences like “The tall man has many pretty newspapers” is great and all, it’s not really something you can use in the real world. Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone take advantage of the 80/20 rule (the idea that 20% of the effort yields 80% of the results) to focus only one what really matters. Learning the most commonly-spoken words and most essential grammatical elements via audio of native speakers (and video, with Rosetta Stone) gets most of the attention at the expense of obscure grammatical constructs.
The old-fashioned method of learning a language, or kill and drill approach as I like to call it, focuses on rote memorization and continuous repetition. Little effort is made to put the words and phrases memorized into a relevant context, which can make actually using them a bit challenging at first. That said, the kill and drill approach can be very, very effective if used properly. The problem, of course, is that this approach is horribly boring and feels a lot like real work. Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone, on the other hand, are a lot more fun and interesting. Can you learn the language using either approach? Of course. But the newer methodologies will naturally have a higher success rate due to the simple fact that fewer people will get frustrated (or bored) along the way and quit.
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I have always wanted to learn the Spanish language as much as I want to buy myself a beautiful princess cut ring. At least now, with the help of this article, I already know what is the most effective way to learn it.