Learn Spanish FREE - Learn to Listen

Guide To The Spanish Language
An introduction to Spanish without the grammar - A new and fresh perspective with some interesting items on language and the similarities between Spanish and English 

1.   Learn Spanish Introduction
2.   Spanish Grammar
3.   The use of Language
4.   Spanish Pronunciation
5.   Common History of Spanish and English
6.   Learn to Listen
7.   Language is Musical
8.   Reading Spanish
9.   Spanish is NOT the Official Language of Spain
10. Language Courses
11. Interpretation
12. Some fun items
13. Vocabulary
14. Cognates - Do you know what a cognate is?
15. Learn Vocabulary
16. Efficient Study
17. Mnemotechnics
18. The 146 Most Used Words in Spanish
19. How Do We Make Real Spanish Sounds
20. Vowel Sounds
21. Consonant Sounds
22. Asking a Question in Spanish
23. Masculine Feminine Words
24. Direct Translation
25. Verbs
26. Spanish phrases
27. Cognates continued

Learning Spanish - Learn to Listen

We need to learn to listen. You can learn a tremendous amount just by listening to people speaking the language. It surprises a lot of people when I suggest that in addition to learning to “speak Spanish” they also have to learn to “hear Spanish”, that they have to train their ear. When I first heard two Spanish people talking it was more like white noise than a language. I then made some progress and learned to put together a sentence and with great enthusiasm went out onto the street to try out my new skill. I asked a passer-by in pretty clear Spanish, “Which way to the post office please” the response was more like the sound of a machine gun rattling off at 600 rounds a second than anything I could possibly understand. I quickly learned the phrase “Mas despacio por favor” which translates as “more slowly please”, a very useful phrase for the Spanish student. What I have learned is that the more I listen to people speaking Spanish the more I can get to pick out key words, even when they speak at the speed of light. It seems that your ear gets “tuned in” to the language. Nowadays I am pleased to be able to say, I do not have to ask them to speak more slowly, well not most of the time anyway. I can now understand more of what they say because I have become attuned to the language. I have trained my ear by listening carefully and picking out recognizable words. 

It is surprising how much you can make sense of what people are trying to say by picking out key words, you don’t have to know and understand every single word to get the gist of what they are saying. It is true that for the untrained ear listening to native Spanish speakers is daunting because it is difficult to distinguish individual words. The problem is that many words are spoken without having a space between them. We also do this in English. In fact most fluent speakers will do it in whichever language they speak. In English we may say something like “howyadoing?” which sounds like one word rather than three words because not many people would include spaces between the words and speak it slowly to say “how are you doing?” maybe we would say “that’smimum” instead of “that is my mum” in this case we have not only omitted spaces between the words but have also ignored the letter “I” in the word “is”.

In writing we have to use the apostrophe to communicate the omission of some letters. “That’s fine I’m here now”; In this sentence we have used the apostrophe twice. Some speakers especially from the south of England would also omit the “h” sound in the word “here” and pronounce the word here as “ear”. The foreign language student trying to understand English spoken fast and without clear spaces between words just hears a long mumbled sound and will have trouble trying to identify the individual words. 

The English speaker learning Spanish has the same problem, we hear something that resembles a machine gun rather than coherent intelligent sentences. There is a technical name for what's happening by omitting the spaces between words and some letters – the word for it is “ELISION” the dictionary definition tells us this is a word for the omission of sounds as words are combined into phrases and sentences – an act or an instance of omitting something.