logoalt Hacker News

nchmytoday at 3:27 PM1 replyview on HN

I learned Spanish just by being immersed and not really worrying about anything.

I mostly just focused on real, practical vocab. And the verb conjugation came with time.

I ignored verb conjugations at first - eg "He eat food."

Then learned present tense and used tricks to speak past and future tense "Tomorrow he eats food" (but you don't even need present tense for that!)

Then learned the simpler of the two ways to speak in the future - it's equivalent to "I am going to __" rather than "I will __" (in Spanish each verb needs conjugation when saying I will, but you use infinitive when saying going to.

Likewise I picked one of the past tenses (one refers to specific point in time, other is just "in the past"). Doesn't matter, in practical usage.

The rest - progressive, imperative, etc all comes with time. You don't really "need" them though. I still don't know the subjunctive tenses (which are sort of hypothetical, feeling etc) and effectively communicate with people about literally anything.

Most important of all, you just have to be humble, get rid of your pride/shame, and be willing and eager to make mistakes. I've spoken with thousands of native speakers and never had a bad experience due to lack of proficiency, even when I knew nothing. This is what most learners of language (or anything) lack, and they therefore are too afraid to ever actually practice. They need a psychologist more than a language teacher.


Replies

kstrausertoday at 3:56 PM

I’ve gotten so much mileage out of “¿cómo se dice…?”.