The Best Spanish Course that Money can Buy

By Julio Foppoli

You spent a fortune buying the most expensive Spanish language course that money can buy. You cannot wait to get started. After all, Spanish is the second most popular language in the world with nearly 407 million native speakers. 43 million people in the United States alone are native speakers and most businesses nowadays are seeking employees who are bilingual. That’s why you decide to wait no more and get The Best Spanish Course that Money can Buy!

You spent a fortune buying the most expensive Spanish language course that money can buy. You can’t wait to get started. All your high hopes are there, just waiting for the miracle to take place: you will finally be able to master this elusive language that for years has been haunting your mind. You will have all the time in the world to sit in front of those premium quality videos and superb exercises developed by the most authoritative experts in the field. You will be able to study at your own pace as often as you want, at any time of the day or night, comes hell or high water. Besides, those convincing testimonials you read about people who were once in your shoes and now are experts in the language cannot be wrong. You can’t help but admire all those regular Joes who became proficient in 30 days or less. You are now one step from becoming one of them. Nothing will stop you now. You are bound to succeed. The sky is the limit.

Have you ever felt like this? If so, you are not alone. Day after day thousands of Spanish learners spend fortunes in language courses that offer what we mentioned above and even more. Failure is not even a possibility. However, after trying these miraculous courses for a couple of days, weeks and some even months, you begin to wonder why it is that you are not seeing the promised results. You are doing each single exercise, sometimes even several times a day. You are repeating every single phrase and word you come across in your course, you are even making imaginary dialogues in your mind all day long. Nevertheless, you cannot communicate.

How come? All those people could not be wrong. There must be something wrong with you then. After all, if everyone but you succeeded, it may mean you are not cut out to learn a second language. After several unsuccessful attempts, you may start to believe the course was not that good after all. You feel down in the dumps. You have come to realize that after 30 days you do not speak the language proficiently. You have learned a few phrases though, but in spite of that, even if you had to use them you would not know when or how. Or what is someone said something a bit different from what you repeated hundreds of time. Would you be able to recognize it? What if they pronounced a bit faster or with a different intonation than those of the language course? That was good Spanish! So clear and slow that you could understand every single word the speaker said! So perfect that….no one in real life uses it…. Have you ever felt like this? If so, here you are not alone either.

What is sad is to see that in spite of this, many learners overcome their initial frustration by… buying the next Spanish course they come across. Time and again they engage in a vicious circle which yields nothing but frustration. If this describes you, I would encourage you to have a look at these suggested readings which will be the focus of our next newsletter (At the bottom of this article). These readings will provide you with some background knowledge that I feel every second language learner needs in order to make informed decisions of what can help him or her in their learning, rather than jumping blindfoldedly to buy whatever is offered to them.

In our next issue we will discuss:

1) Why most language courses fail time and again.

2) Are audio and video courses per se enough to make you a proficient speaker of a second language? What does research on first language acquisition say about this issue?

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