The Easy Listening Method of Learning Spanish

If like me you have lived in Tenerife for several years and don’t yet speak relatively good Spanish some of your Spanish friends and acquaintances will be starting to lose patience with you. It may be that they are beginning to forget what English they know in an effort to force you to pick up the lingo faster. Or perhaps in the company of your local friends you feel increasingly uncomfortable when at the end of a long and involved story they all point at you and scream with laughter?

Well, in the immortal words of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, DON’T PANIC for I have discovered a truly effective and absolutely lazy way to learn Spanish. Not only will you find phrases that you once thought impossibe to learn tripping lightly off your tongue, you’ll develop a pleasant jaunty lilt to your voice and find that much of what you can confidently say in Spanish tends to rhyme.

Yes, I have set myself up with my own Spanish station on Last.fm. Easy, peasy and the songs I have included tend to be clearly annunciated and cover a wide range of topics though granted I am not quite sure how I will manage to include some of them into actual conversation.

Actually joking aside, it has been quite helpful. You know when you first arrive in a foreign country and all the words string together like a great glob of porridge? Then after you have settled in a bit you can start to pick out some of the individual words but you have not a hope in hell of actually pronouncing any of them? Well, listening to the words set to music helps a great deal towards both.

When I find a song I like I look up the lyrics and save them to a file. Before long I am actually singing along and believe it or not I find that this has helped me follow along with conversations when I am in Spanish company. Using Google to translate the lyrics I am also adding to my vocabulary.

So if your Spanish speaking skills are a bit flat, set them to music and you might find a whole new beat.