Hi I'm a beginner in Spanish and I'm trying to learn during the coronavirus but it's really difficult to learn on my own! I was wondering if you have any suggestions to help a poor girl out?
Hi! I’m sorry this is so late, I had to recover from surgery and now my house is in chaos trying to clean and prep before I go back to uni lmao.
I relate deeply. I’m going to try to keep this concise, but the first is SMART goals. Specific, Measurable, Assignable, Relevant, Time-based. Keep your goals small, specific, and on-point to what you want. If you want to “get better at Spanish” you should take a good look at where you are and where you want to be, and how far you can realistically get in the time that you have.
Then decide how much time you’re going to devote to it. My rule of thumb is at least half an hour, three days a week, for a single language. And then don’t just say “I’m going to do a half hour of Spanish.” Assign a specific focus, whether it’s the alphabet, greetings, 30 basic nouns, conjugating 5 verbs, whatever it may be. I’m not sure where you are in terms of “beginner,” but this applies higher up the scale as well. You cannot expect yourself to learn 100 words that you drill over the course of 3 days. 30-50, however, is definitely reasonable.
I always go by amount of words. My goal for 2020 is 1500 new words in Portuguese, which means studying 10 new words every 3 days. At this point, I‘m at almost 800! And in between, I study grammar, of course, because you need that to link them together.
I also go by level. I’m trying to move from beginner to mid-conversational, hence the 1500 new words in a year. You might be trying to move from mid-conversational to strong conversational, and you’ll only need, like, a couple new verb grammar lessons and 200 specialized words. You have to decide what you want to glean from it!
Anyway, this was super general, so if you need more specific help, feel free to send another ask!
