Starting to Learn Spanish? Listen!

When I wrote my ebook, Five Keys to Learning Spanish Rapidly, one of the keys was listening. Now I’ve come across some research from New Zealand that indicates that listening to the sound patterns of the language you are trying to learn – even if it is meaningless at the start – is evidently critical to learning that language fast.

Listening sets up neural structures in your brain, pathways that are necessary for you to learn and remember words.

So if you are just beginning Spanish, be sure to listen to everything you can. Music, talk, anything with words. Spanish NewsBites is one example of a free website where you can listen, but there are many more.

A bit from the article I read:

Victoria University PhD graduate Paul Sulzberger made his discovery while trying to find out why many students dropped out in the early days of trying to learn a new language.

He believed his findings could revolutionize language teaching.

He was interested in what made it so difficult to learn foreign words when we were constantly learning new ones in our native language. He found the answer in the way the brain developed neural structures when hearing new combinations of sounds.

I follow several blogs about language learning, and found this at one about being a better EFL (English as a foreign language) teacher. Very useful tidbit! And I’m sure it helps us all, no matter what our level of Spanish. This study seems to have focused on beginning students of Spanish.