I have decided to learn Spanish. In this article, I will share with you the most effective way to learn a foreign language. I'll use Spanish and Italian as my examples. Because I already speak Italian and I learned it fast. I speak five languages and my BA degree is in Languages. I will preach what I practice.

Number one: to learn the language fast we must have the purpose and the motivation to do it.

For example, my main motivation for learning Spanish is that want to live in Spain during the winter period because I cannot stand English winters. So instead of misery and drizzly English winter, I want to experience Valencia's sunshine, swimming in the sea and watching the sunset whilst looking at the mountains.

My second motivation is to spend time with my friends there some of them cannot speak English well. If I speak Spanish I will have fun at parties with my friends.

So if I am going to spend my winters in Spain I would need to buy a sim card, buy food in a supermarket, I might be using a train. I will go horse riding and dancing there. So what I am going to do? I am going to write a list of topics where I would need to speak Spanish: supermarket, mobile phone shop, train station. I would gather vocabulary for these topics. I will write it down in my exercise book.

Now to a boring part. I cannot proceed without learning by heart the structure of basic Spanish grammar. I know I must learn by heart the conjugation of important verbs such as “to be, “to have”, to go” with pronouns; past, present, and future tenses; numbers, measurements, days of the week, months of the year, and so on. So I am going to invest 4 weeks to learn the structure of Spanish by heart, not more than that because it would be too boring.

So instead of overinvesting in grammar I would buy audio books and listen to them when driving. This is what I did when I learned Italian. I would listen to a detective story several times. The first time I just understood the main idea, when I listened to the same book the second time I understood more details and more words, and then as I progressed I could understand everything. There are books for different levels of language: beginners, intermediate and advanced. I will start with a beginner’s level.

On top of that, I will arrange with my Spanish friend to speak in Spanish for 5-10 minutes every day and in return, or exchange I will speak English with her for 10 minutes. I will practice my topics with her. It should be every day not once in a blue moon.

To summarise: to learn to speak in a foreign language we must have great motivation and purpose to do it, learn the basic structure/grammar by heart, listen to audiobooks, and speak every day.

Is that too much? Well, I have some advice for you: I want you to forget everything I said and just get a pillow dictionary instead.

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