That's great! I majored in/completed a degree in Spanish (although... I don't use it anymore, which is uh... oops). There really is quite a lot to learn within all things language and culture, but Spanish is also so abundant in the global world that there are plenty of resources and such.
Watching shows in Spanish with Spanish subtitles is a really great way to become familiar with the sounds of the language and to train your brain to derive meaning from those sounds based on the meanings you derive from reading. Other things you could do along the reading route are read translations of books you're already familiar with, for example Harry Potter. It might also be worthwhile to try seeking out podcasts, news stations, music, or audiobooks that are in moderate-pace Spanish to wean yourself off subtitles and get more direct ear practice.
The speaking part is pretty difficult--especially if you don't have a lot of real world inventive to do it. It really is just a matter of practice and getting in those hours and hours of mouth/accent training. But being auditorally familiar with the language does help with your accent, because it makes it easier to identify when your own sounds are wrong, but developing the reflex to say certain words/phrases and building the muscles in your mouth to consistently form a different set of phonemes just takes lots of talking time. Make an effort to talk to yourself out loud in Spanish randomly, for example narrate chores, or make an attempt once a day to describe something you're looking at, or read poetry or news articles or short stories aloud.
I live in the US, so I wouldn't exactly be hurting for ways to practice my Spanish if I wanted to. I took one year of French in high school (simultaneously while continuing Spanish) because I'd originally wanted to take that for my language instead of Spanish, but my parents didn't want me to because Spanish is "more useful," so I decided the best way to circumvent that was to do both, although that proved pretty taxing on my brain and my class schedule, so I stopped, but I'm still surprisingly competent at it (mostly because of how similar it is to Spanish). In college, I took one year (two semesters) of American Sign Language because I'd always thought it was interesting and I had other friends taking it and it's also kind of a queer niche thing to do; I'm very out of practice, but I try to brush up on vocab that may be relevant to customer service so that at the very least I can be useful to Deaf customers as a professional (which has happened several times!). I've also dabbled very lightly into German, Italian, Esperanto, and Portuguese, but none of those stuck terribly well. I can also understand an okay amount of Mandarin because it's the heritage language I was raised around, but it ultimately stuck very poorly with me and I have a horrific accent if I try to speak it, and I can't read it.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2019-11-12 06:47 am (UTC)Watching shows in Spanish with Spanish subtitles is a really great way to become familiar with the sounds of the language and to train your brain to derive meaning from those sounds based on the meanings you derive from reading. Other things you could do along the reading route are read translations of books you're already familiar with, for example Harry Potter. It might also be worthwhile to try seeking out podcasts, news stations, music, or audiobooks that are in moderate-pace Spanish to wean yourself off subtitles and get more direct ear practice.
The speaking part is pretty difficult--especially if you don't have a lot of real world inventive to do it. It really is just a matter of practice and getting in those hours and hours of mouth/accent training. But being auditorally familiar with the language does help with your accent, because it makes it easier to identify when your own sounds are wrong, but developing the reflex to say certain words/phrases and building the muscles in your mouth to consistently form a different set of phonemes just takes lots of talking time. Make an effort to talk to yourself out loud in Spanish randomly, for example narrate chores, or make an attempt once a day to describe something you're looking at, or read poetry or news articles or short stories aloud.
I live in the US, so I wouldn't exactly be hurting for ways to practice my Spanish if I wanted to. I took one year of French in high school (simultaneously while continuing Spanish) because I'd originally wanted to take that for my language instead of Spanish, but my parents didn't want me to because Spanish is "more useful," so I decided the best way to circumvent that was to do both, although that proved pretty taxing on my brain and my class schedule, so I stopped, but I'm still surprisingly competent at it (mostly because of how similar it is to Spanish). In college, I took one year (two semesters) of American Sign Language because I'd always thought it was interesting and I had other friends taking it and it's also kind of a queer niche thing to do; I'm very out of practice, but I try to brush up on vocab that may be relevant to customer service so that at the very least I can be useful to Deaf customers as a professional (which has happened several times!). I've also dabbled very lightly into German, Italian, Esperanto, and Portuguese, but none of those stuck terribly well. I can also understand an okay amount of Mandarin because it's the heritage language I was raised around, but it ultimately stuck very poorly with me and I have a horrific accent if I try to speak it, and I can't read it.