Master of Memory: Accelerated learning, education, memorization - MMem 0430: How to maintain basic knowledge of Spanish

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Christine has started the free Accelerated Spanish course but has to put her learning on hold. How should she maintain her knowledge of Spanish fundamentals without spending too much time per day? What do you want to learn? Leave your question at http://MasterOfMemory.com/. Music credit: Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet, 2nd movement, performed by the US Army Band.

Master of Memory 430. Welcome to Master of Memory. I'm Timothy and I'm here to answer your accelerated learning questions every day and to inspire and empower you to learn anything you want to learn faster than ever. Christine wrote in an email, I'm going to have to start hardcore Spanish once I'm done with school in December. I'm getting used to married life and setting up a home and church stuff and trying to finish up school.

It ended up being too much for me to start on Spanish hardcore, but I will begin in December. I read your how to begin in Spanish link that you included in an email, and I understand the concept well. But for me, what would you suggest I do to start practicing a little bit more,

though in my spare moments? Maybe I should practice memorizing the tenses or the verbs? So Christine, this is an interesting question, because the fact is that, as anybody who's studied a language knows, the dimensions of a language are very, very complex. You have lots of things going on, grammar, vocabulary, all kinds of idioms, and you're always learning new idioms, even in English. But if you've attained a basic knowledge of Spanish, depending on how that may be defined, how is it that you maintain that when you don't have a lot of time so you can pick up studying it again in the future? Well, the way that the accelerated Spanish course that you've

been looking at is structured, you actually have almost all of the essential vocabulary and grammar in the very first six lessons, which I think you've already looked at. So just those first six lessons have most of Spanish grammar and enough vocabulary to account for about 50% of spoken or written Spanish. So that's already a huge win. And if you only focus on reviewing that stuff, you're doing yourself a big favor because you're not going to try and go and learn obscure vocabulary instead of maintaining the essential foundations that you've already laid. So what I would suggest is occasionally listening to a short dialogue, a short native written dialogue that includes as many of the concepts,

these essential concepts as possible and nothing more. Of course, we have that dialogue at masterofmemory.com slash Spanish in the free Spanish course. You can just keep reviewing the module one dialogue and listening to that once in a while. It doesn't take much time. I would suggest listening to it while reading it. So devote just a few minutes once in a while to make sure that you understand everything, but you're reviewing a good amount of the language, great foundations of the language, just in that dialogue. And then also occasionally review your memory palaces for remembering the verb tenses, as you say, and a lot of the vocabulary, although you're restricting it to about 1 to 200 words, so you're only focusing on the most essentials,

and it won't take too much time. And honestly, if you put even just this small amount of effort in, just let's say 10 minutes a day, to review these things from the first half of the Spanish course, you're really ahead of most Spanish students who have studied broadly all kinds of vocabulary and grammar and things like that, but don't really have all of the essential concepts really solid.

So that's what I would suggest for maintaining a basic knowledge of Spanish. Focus exclusively on the essentials, on the very most frequent vocabulary and the essentials of Spanish grammar, and then just listen to it a little bit, read it a little bit, in the most essential aspects of it with that dialogue that I've mentioned. Thanks for the question, Christine. And for everyone listening, what do you want to learn? The world's knowledge can be yours.

Leave your learning request at masterofmemory.com slash question, and I'll talk to you again soon.