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Nearly a half-billion people on this planet speak Spanish as their first or second language, and it's the official tongue in 14 nations. Along with Mandarin (a billion speakers, including second-language speakers) and English (900 million), Spanish is one of the top three most widely spoken languages in the world. 

Beyond that, nearly 14 million Ecuadorians speak Spanish as their first language. If you wish to have a prayer of communicating with them, at least a little Spanish needs to come out of your mouth on demand.

I did something really stupid in high school: I took four years of French (a mere 175 million bilinguals). So I've always been behind the curve when it comes to speaking Spanish. Still, I've been trying to learn since I went to Panama in 2001 and I've applied a variety of practices, media, and technology to the effort, including community-college classes, endless books, various computer and audio programs (such as Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur), private tutoring, an immersion course in Buenos Aires, Internet language swapping (such as LiveMocha.com), Google Translator, and more.

In these pages, I review the many varieties of learning this language and discuss what works best (and doesn't work) for me.

 

Articles

  WHY LEARN SPANISH?
You can get by traveling or even living in Ecuador without knowing Spanish. You can. It’s like traveling to any country where you don’t know the language. You can’t know every language in the world, even the major ones.
  SO YOU THINK YOU DON'T KNOW SPANISH?
I did something dumb in high school: I took French. Don’t ask me why. The French teacher was sexy. A girl I had a crush on was in the class. Two friends talked me into it. I grew up in New York, where French and Italian and Yiddish and even Greek seemed more important than Spanish.
  SO YOU THINK YOU DO KNOW SPANISH?
It's not like Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, or Russian, where you have to learn a whole new alphabet (though you do need to learn the pronunciation of the Spanish alphabet, so you can ask for things like the ATM machine; imagine someone in the U.S. asking you where to find the Ah Tay Eme). But it's still, to be sure, a foreign language.
  SPANISH FOR BEGINNERS
A few weeks ago, the Cuenca Chamber of Commerce, through its Cuenca for Expats program, held a Spanish-language class, Sobreviviendo Espanol (Survival Spanish). Taught by Nancy Mora, an excellent local language teacher, it was an extremely enjoyable and educational couple hours –- for me, my roommate Greg (whose Ecuadorian girlfriend Estela speaks almost no Spanish) and Noel (whose wife Christine grew up in a missionary family in Bolivia and is perfectly fluent).
  SPANISH FOR BEGINNERS PART TWO
Right after my third Chamber of Commerce Spanish class (click here for the tale of how I came to teach a such a class), which topped out at 19 students and pretty much blew us out of the conference room, I started seriously considering expanding the operation.
  SPANISH-IMMERSION SCHOOL IN CUENCA
Last Wednesday, I took my final exam at Nexus, the Cuenca language school I’d attended since mid-June. Three days a week –- Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday –- the class convened at 8 a.m., which necessitated getting up at 6:30 to be out of the house by 7:45 for the drive across town to school. Over a period of eight weeks, I attended three two-hour classes a week, taking, in all, 50 hours of intermediate Spanish, taught immersion-style.
  TEACHING AT THE CUENCA CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
Felipe, I came to realize, was a fittingly surreal transition between a Spanish class where I sat as a student and a Spanish class where I stood at the teacher. I’d launched my new career -- indeed, answered my new calling –- with this Spanish for Beginners class at the Cuenca Chamber of Commerce nearly four months earlier. (For that story, click here.) Those 15 classes, from 10:30 to 12:30 on Wednesdays, had been a wild ride, to say the least.
  GIVING THE FINAL EXAM AT HOSTAL HARO
I’d announced in the previous week’s classes that there’d be a test, a final exam, the last week of the cycle and I prepared a 100-question test that covered most of what I’d taught over the previous nine weeks. Not being a teacher (until now) and having just taken a final exam in a Spanish class, it was, to say the least, enlightening and entertaining to be giving a test of my own.