In our last blogpost we talked about why you should learn Spanish here, in San Carlos. But what if what you are struggling with is not where to study Spanish, but if? There are countless reasons to learn Spanish, but the ones listed in this blog are the most important ones to me.
I always thought that, before I would ever go to South America, I would learn Spanish. Now I have been here for over 5 months and am finally starting the official language learning process. I knew some sentences and words before and could make myself understood in daily life, but most of the time I did not understand what they were trying to tell me. And if I understood, I did not know how to answer properly. Also, the basics I got were all through podcasts and Babbel, a language learning App. Despite my good intentions, this is not how you truly learn a language, let alone speak it. Truth is, in most countries of South America you can get by with very basic skills and by talking with your hand and feet. Although hardly anyone actually speaks English, you don’t need a lot of language skills to survive. But - and that’s what made it for me: It is so much more fun, interesting and overall better to know the language!
My Spanish learning experience has been accompanied by views like this!
I strongly believe that you will be most successful in learning a language if you know exactly, why you are doing it. You have to have a good reason that motivates you to speed up the progress. Else, it might take you forever, not be any fun and you hardly learn anything (usually exactly what learning languages in school is for most kids). In general, humans are lazy beings. Without a good incentive we don’t do anything more than necessary. So, if you think about learning Spanish I think you should spend some time thinking about why you want to learn it. I myself had to learn several languages in school and although it was not bad, there is a huge difference between then and now. I am progressing so much faster than I used to. I think this is partly due to the fact that here at Spanish Adventures, I am fully immersed in a Spanish Culture, confronted to speak a lot and always around people that only speak Spanish. And this, but also my other reason and inner motivation make me want to speak, make me want to speed up my process.
There are a lot of good reasons to learn Spanish, maybe those can help you find more motivation for yourself.
Spanish is widely spoken and by a big part of the world’s population. There are nearly 500 million native speakers worldwide. That makes Spanish the fourth-most spoken language after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi. (And may I dare to say that you probably already speak English and learning Hindi or Chinese – if you don’t plan on going to china or India for a longer period of time – does make a lot less sense and is way more complicated.)
Although there are a variety of accents in Spanish, you will still be able to speak everywhere and to anyone that speaks it. There might be some initial issues, but after some acclimatization you will get along just fine. Which is not the same with other widely spoken languages such as Hindu, Arabic or Chinese. In those languages the accents can an often are so different that people have to speak in English or (partly) artificial created languages such as High Arabic or Mandarin.
Reaching a good conversation level in Spanish is relatively easy and the people in most of the Spanish speaking countries I’ve been very eager to help you speaking. It is a unique feeling for me to be able to speak to local people in their own tongue instead of always having to try it in English. South and Central America are the only undeveloped regions I have ever visited where I could speak the local tongue. In Africa and Asia I was always the tourist that only speaks English – and I am very sure that this will not change any time soon. Swahili, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese and so forth are simply too complicated to learn and not useful in a lot of countries.
Spanish speaking countries offer almost all the world has, from tropical countries with heavenly beaches, dense jungles and volcanoes over the Andean countries with mountain ranges, (salt) deserts and the Amazon to the far south where you can visit Patagonia with its icebergs and wide nature…
It is a beautiful language. Of course, this is a very subjective statement, but I simply love Spanish. The sound, the uncountable ways of expressing yourself with a word for almost everything… I mean, they even have a specific verb for the rain to stop!
I could go on. There are quite some more reasons for me to keep learning Spanish. And I am so glad that I finally started. But I want to leave some space for you to find your own reasons…
Food for thoughts… And I am sure this type of food will only speed up my learning process.