In today’s edition of the Saturday Spanish newsletter, I’m going to get you speaking.
You don’t need a teacher or textbook or app for this.
This is good old fashioned Talking To Yourself. You may have heard me mention the benefits of this before.
I’m dedicating this edition of the newsletter to it because it bears repeating: self talk is an amazing tool for improving your fluency in a convenient, low-pressure way.
You start to take all those words that are rattling around your brain and put them to use!
But what about my mistakes?
“Hold on, hold on”, I hear you saying. “How will I know if I’m saying something wrong?”
The goal here is not correctness — it’s communication of an idea.
More often than not, getting corrected mid sentence just hurts your flow and confidence.
And conscious consideration of grammar does not play nice with fluency.
Basically, when you’re stuck in your analytical brain (is it le or lo, preterite or imperfect), you cannot communicate smoothly.
When you focus on communication over correctness, you let the grammar happen in the background and give your brain the freedom it needs to stop overthinking and just speak.
Let’s practice!
This is a simple exercise. All you need are a few questions and a few minutes.
Here are 3 questions for you to answer today.
Keep you sentences short and use whatever verb tenses you already know.
———-
1. ¿Qué has hecho hoy?
Take 1-2 minutes and describe in as much detail as you can.
2. ¿Prefieres vivir en la ciudad o en el campo?
Take 1-2 minutes and describe in as much detail as you can.
3. ¿Cuándo fue la última vez que saliste a comer? ¿Qué comiste? ¿Qué tal la experiencia?
Take 1-2 minutes and describe in as much detail as you can.
———-
I like to record myself when doing this (Voice Memos on iPhone, Voice Recorder on Android). Then I can listen back and catch some of my own mistakes and look up words I was unsure about.
Let me know how it goes!
– Connor
P.S. If you want Spanish pronunciation that sounds natural, feels smoother, and makes you want to use what you’ve learned, check out the Confident Spanish Pronunciation workshop.
Recently, I took a bunch of you through this workshop live — 60 minutes of pronunciation training and 30 minutes of Q&A.
Now, you can join and watch it immediately. You can jump around, fast forward, rewind, and rewatch as much as you like, for as long as you like — your access will not expire.
Join here — in under an hour will help you start building the skills to confidently say or read anything in Spanish.
