Daily Dose of English 177
Learning Spanish
Daily Dose of English 177
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you can make it today. In this episode, we're gonna be talking about learning Spanish because that is something that I've done a whole heck of a lot of and I wanna talk about it. Plus, I talk plenty about languages and language learning, but not really specifically about my own experience learning languages, necessarily. So actually today I'm going to be talking about learning Spanish, and then tomorrow I'll be talking about Czech, which I've also have been learning for over a year now. I'm at very, very different levels in both the languages, and so I think it'll be an interesting comparison. So make sure that you come back tomorrow for the other episode. Now, I started learning Spanish back in 2021 or something. It was during COVID, during the lockdown. And I had left New York rather quickly. I was living there with my partner at the time. And we had sort of heard about COVID. It was like, OK, this is a little bit suspicious. It's really spreading fast. We weren't in a great living situation in New York. We weren't renting officially and it was just, it was expensive. And we're like, maybe we should go. And so we got a plane like the next day, like one day later, we got out of there and then we landed and like 12 hours later, there was like an announcement that New York was completely closed, that no more flights were leaving or anything. And so we had barely just gotten out before we were trapped essentially. So we barely made it out, and it was a good call. And we went to go live in her hometown of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, which is in the north of Mexico, right on the border of the US and Mexico. It's a very interesting town. It's not very nice. It's very ugly. It used to be pretty dangerous. It can be pretty dangerous still. And it's quite big, but it's really interesting because of the level of English between the countries, really, because there are thousands of people that live in Mexico, on the Mexico side, that aren't even technically Mexican citizens, that were born in the U.S., that go to school in the U.S., but they cross the border every single day. There's also plenty of people that aren't Mexican citizens, sorry, that are Mexican citizens that also cross every day. It's a very interesting place. But my partner and her family all spoke good English, so I didn't have any reason to learn. I was inside all the time, so I didn't really have a real reason to learn Spanish. I wasn't like forced into it. However, I ended up with a lot of free time and I decided to start learning Spanish like for real because everybody in the US or most people in the US have some sort of Spanish experience in school from middle school, high school, whatever. So I had like a couple years back in middle school, but it was like singing songs and stuff. I didn't learn anything. I could maybe count to 10 and I knew a couple words. I studied German in high school and right, that doesn't help with Spanish at all. So I found myself with a bunch of free time and I came across refold actually. So the company that I now work for, I came across refold in a YouTube video and I was like, well, hang on. These are a lot of the things that I use when teaching English and I recommend that people do this. Why am I not doing this with Spanish? And also, this is more complete. My own English teaching was, whatever, like 40 or 50% of what the entire refold guide was. And so I used the refold guide, the original one, to really put a lot of time into Spanish. And I started watching primarily TV shows was my biggest source of immersion. I really jumped into TV shows, easier ones, slightly harder ones, and really making them as understandable as I could using tools. I also re-listened to the entire Harry Potter series, which is a series that I know very well in English because I listened to it dozens of times growing up. I think I've literally listened to it 20 times now in various languages, mostly in English. And so I listened to that in Spanish and I started reading as well. And I basically just got to, I put a lot of time in. I was, I had a lot of free time. That relationship was not going very well. So I had even extra more free time. And I was working, like I was working online. And I was like working with students when they had time basically. So I didn't have like a full nine to five job. I was sort of just working when I had classes. And basically all the rest of the time I just immersed in Spanish. And so I ended up putting in, I think I started in, I don't remember what month I started in, but I think it was in like later in the year, like July, August or something. And I remember that that October, I think it was 2022, maybe 2021. I don't really remember, maybe 2021, because now it's 2024. I've been learning for three-ish, a little over three years. So yeah, I think in 2021, yeah. Late 2021, I, I was putting in over 100 hours a month of good immersion time, not even just passively listening. I was actively paying attention for over 100 hours a month, which is a lot. That's an average of three and a half hours per day. And so I was making really good progress in my comprehension, yada, yada, yada. Eventually that relationship ended. I went back to live in Oregon for a while and I just kept putting in more time into Spanish. I wasn't really practicing speaking that much. I was very focused on just understanding, reading, listening, YouTube, that sort of thing. I don't remember exactly how things happened. That time of my life is sort of a blur. But I know that I ended up surpassing 1,000 hours, 2,000 hours pretty quickly. And eventually, at some point, I came to live in Mexico City. And I started speaking a lot more then. I made friends. I started to go play games. I never really had a phase of like trying to improve my speaking. My speaking was just kind of getting better. I did have some classes at some point. I just don't really remember when I started speaking a lot more and sounding Mexican. Because like now I'm at the point where I can easily use Spanish and communicate with people I don't sound like foreign. I don't like I I do sound not native, but I don't really sound foreign if that makes any sense like it's a difference between like yeah it's pretty clear that i make mistakes and like i'm not perfect i'm not a native spanish speaker but i'm also not like a spanish learner it's just it's this weird middle ground where most people don't even really think about the fact that i'm not um And that's very, that could be very helpful for me, right? Because it makes the conversations easier. It's not annoying. People don't try to switch to English. Like my Spanish is better than most of their English. So we almost always speak in English. but it also does create a little bit of friction if I'm not perfect, right? Because if somebody's expecting me to be as good as a native speaker, it can create a bit of tension and that sort of thing. I've really enjoyed my Spanish learning. I think it's a fantastic language. There are lots of really good resources. I still immerse and do things every single day in Spanish. I have lots of friends that I only speak Spanish with. I watch a lot of YouTube in Spanish. I used to watch a lot of TV shows, but I don't do that much anymore. I'm now right into watching a lot of movies, primarily in English right now. And that's been really nice to just get more exposure to movies and film that I like, but it Yeah, and it's not really even cutting into my Spanish time. I read in Spanish, right? All my books that I read are in Spanish. Almost all my audio books, I listen to, no, I don't really listen to podcasts, but there's so much stuff that I do in Spanish and I don't even think about it, right? And that's a thing, the point that I am with Spanish is that it's all just a part of my life. It's just a thing that I do. It's a thing that I can speak and use. It's... Yeah, I don't really know how else to explain it other than it being just such an ingrained part of my life that it's basically as if I was half Spanish speaker, right? I've converted my life into be half English speaker, half Spanish speaker. A lot of my personal life is in Spanish, a lot of my professional life, I was gonna say, that I bought whole life, which doesn't make sense in Spanish either. But yeah, a lot of my professional life is in English and then personal life is in Spanish. That is something that I noticed happening in English is that I'll have like a random Spanish word come up for me in my brain and like I'll want to say it, but like in an English way. But it doesn't always even make sense in Spanish. Like I'm thinking in English, but like the Spanish word comes up. Um, I don't know why this happens. It's a sort of, it's kind of funny because like I, my brain's like here, use this word. And I'm like, no, hang on. That's a Spanish word. I'm speaking English right now. Please don't say that. And it's like, no, no, no, just use it. It's fine. Just use it. It's fine. Like stop. It's not the right word. It's like, ah, fine. Here's the right word in English and go, thank you. Um, and. Yeah, that's more or less, I think, my Spanish learning. I don't really, I mean, this has already been 10 minutes. How is this 10 minutes? I just talked about my past with Spanish. Um, but if any of you listening are not Spanish speakers, I know that, um, a fair number of people that listen to these are, but if you're not and you're comfortable with your English level, I would recommend Spanish as a language to learn. It's really interesting. It's really fun. There is so much out there. Yeah. I'm, you know what? I'm going to keep talking a little bit. This episode is going to be a bit longer. There's so much stuff out there from just dozens of countries. I think there's over 20 Spanish-speaking countries. There are over 500 million native speakers. The accents are really varied and interesting. There's cool stuff that you can engage with. It's a lot like English, actually. English is spoken very widely, very broadly. Spanish is also spoken in many countries and many continents. where something like, even Russian for example, Russian is spoken primarily in a group of countries that are very close together and have, I mean, have a lot of similarities culturally. Spanish-speaking countries also do have many cultural similarities. shared cultural values and things, which is also true for English, but I think that there is a little more variety in there. Maybe that's just my bias of knowing English and Spanish, but for example, something like Mandarin Chinese is primarily spoken in one country, which is fairly homogenous. The other Chinese languages are a lot more varied and have interesting things behind them, but a lot of the Mandarin speakers can release. I'm not gonna say be similar, that's not true, but there's a lot less variation in the dialects and the languages because it's really only spoken in China and then a little bit in Taiwan, but that is a different thing. And the number of speakers is way less. Plus there's a couple other countries, but there's just not as broad of coverage of a lot of languages. So English and Spanish are really special in that regard that there are just tons of speakers everywhere. So that makes them for some really cool stuff. There's some amazing movies, TV shows, live streams, YouTube content from everywhere. Some of the biggest content creators in the world are Spanish speakers. One of the probably the most famous ones is Ibai, who is a Spanish streamer from Spain. And he does humongous events that like break Twitch. I think last year he did some huge event that just broke the view number. Like it was, he had so many viewers at once that the entire Twitch platform was just like, we didn't think anybody would get this high. I think it was like 300,000 people watching live at once, one event, which is crazy. And there's a ton of just, there's a bunch of Spanish streamers that go live to tens of thousands of people every day. which is also getting true with English. English streamers are growing a lot, but I think there's just more in Spanish because there's more native speakers of the language, I think. English has a lot more second language speakers, but I'm pretty sure it's more native Spanish speakers. I could be wrong, though. I'm not Googling that. So yeah, I highly recommend Spanish. It's really interesting. I don't wanna say it's an easy language, but it's also not a hard language. in the grand scheme of things, especially if you speak English, because there is a lot of shared words between English and Spanish. There is a lot of things that you already know if you speak English, right? Conversación is conversation. You can figure that out pretty easily, and when you read it, it's identical. And there's a lot of words like that that make learning to read really easy, learning a lot of words very easy. and the language functions relatively similarly to English. There's a lot of things that are very, very similar in terms of form or syntax or whatever. Whereas if you're learning a different language, especially like a very distant language, it's just really hard to wrap your head around. With Spanish, it's a bit different, but then once you get it, it's like, okay, I get this, I understand this. Um, it also sounds really cool. There's, yeah, I don't know. I'm not going to keep going on. I think it's a fantastic language. I do recommend that you learn it if you don't already speak it. Um, but that is everything for me. I hope that you enjoyed this episode. I would be curious to hear your experience with Spanish as maybe a native speaker or as a learner down in the comments below. And I'll see you again tomorrow to talk about my Czech learning. Bye.
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