How to Learn a Language by Yourself Without Taking Notes or Doing Boring Grammar Exercises

This year, one of my new year’s resolutions was to become conversational in Spanish.

I attempted to learn Spanish last summer using the Duolingo app, but I stopped after a week because it wasn’t fun at all.

I decided to try again at the beginning of this year, but this time, I made it my mission to learn Spanish in a fun way.

Who wants to tear their hair out studying textbooks, doing grammar exercises or memorizing verb tables?

Not me.

(I’ve been there, done that—with Mandarin and French. I can assure you that while it’s somewhat effective, it’s not fun at all.)

My big question: Was it possible to make language learning fun and not tedious?

Seven months later, I have my answer: Yes!

I still have my hair, woo hoo! But more importantly, I can actually speak Spanish now!

Okay, I’m not fluent by any means, but I would say I’m conversational. I sometimes surprise myself when I realize I can actually understand Spanish, haha.

My Spanish is at a level where I can express my ideas in present, future and past tense and I have an acceptable vocabulary base to get me through day-to-day conversations. I can also consume Spanish media like music, podcasts and YouTube videos pretty comfortably.

And guess what? I didn’t do any of that boring stuff like studying textbooks or taking down notes. A lot of my friends have asked me how I did it, so I will spread the love and share some tips with you!

1. Know why you want to learn the language

After studying French in school for years and years, my writing and reading skills were impeccable but my conversational skills were not so great.

When I visited France two years ago, I struggled to speak French because I had no confidence in my speaking abilities. That made me feel like I wasted a lot of time learning things that weren’t useful.

So I’d like to ask you: What’s your goal? Are you learning the language to converse with people? To travel? To read books? To be a journalist in that language?

This year, with Spanish, I made an executive decision: My focus would be on comprehension and speaking—not reading and writing. And to speed up my learning, I made some compromises…

2. Don’t be afraid to make compromises.

I love the 80/20 rule (also known as the Pareto Principle). It basically says that 80% of your effort produces 20% of your results, and 20% of your effort produces 80% of your results.

When I was learning French in school, I spent a lot of time memorizing nitpicky grammar rules, which didn’t help me speak French at all!

This time with Spanish, I really wanted to focus on the important stuff first, so I made some compromises:

• I ignored accents completely. Yes, yes, I know they change the stresses on words, but I decided that people would just have to accept my incorrect stresses on words for now. They don’t change the pronunciation that much. I’ll get to the accents later!
• For the first three months, I didn’t pay too much attention to masculine vs feminine in nouns and adjectives.
• For the first three months, I ignored the less common pronouns in the verb tables: I would try to memorize the first person singular (I), second person singular (you) and first person plural (we), and just glance at the conjugations for third person singular (he/she), second person plural (you) and third person plural (they) to the extent that I would recognize it when listening/reading.
• I decided that learning numbers weren’t all that important. I knew how to count from 1 to 10, but I didn’t look at numbers beyond 10 until maybe my second month.

3. Get past the initial learning curve as fast as you can.

I totally get you. The beginning is always the hardest and the most frustrating. Figure out which methods help you learn the fastest. Build that foundation fast, and then everything will get easier.

In my first month of learning Spanish, I watched a lot of YouTube videos explaining Spanish grammar and pronunciation.

When listening to songs, I tried to pick out the most commonly used words and verbs. I tried not to be overwhelmed at everything I couldn’t understand.

As I mentioned, I tried using apps like Duolingo last summer, but I realized that my progress would be incredibly slow. I would say that I learned most of my vocabulary through music in the first few weeks. You’d be surprised how much vocabulary you can learn from reading lyrics and using Google translate!

If you have 15 minutes to spare, I highly recommend this TEDx talk. I watched this video at the beginning of the year and it inspired me. It has great tips on how you can get past the initial hurdle.

4. Integrate language learning into your normal activities.

Most of my learning was tacked on to normal activities during my day. For example, I listened to Spanish music or podcasts while cooking, eating, driving, taking the SkyTrain, doing my hair, exercising, brushing my teeth—basically all activities that don’t require much brain power.

I didn’t have to change a lot in my daily schedule or dedicate hours upon hours to study.

Don’t underestimate how much listening to radio for even 20 minutes can do to help you! Seriously, it requires no effort. You don’t even have to strain your ears to try to understand what’s being said.

Of course, active listening is the most effective, but even if you’re just listening to a language in the background, you’re getting used to the sounds of the language little by little.

So what exactly did I do in the last seven months to become conversational in Spanish?

I integrated passive learning into my normal activities (1-2 hours per day)

• Listened to a lot of Spanish music and created my own playlists using Spotify
• Listened to actual Spanish podcasts that are 100% in Spanish (not podcasts that teach you Spanish)
• Listened to radio from Colombia, streamed on my phone
• Changed all my social media accounts to Spanish
• Talked to myself in Spanish and tried to think in Spanish (for example, on the SkyTrain and while I’m jogging)
• Googled things in Spanish instead of English when it wasn’t super important for me to completely understand

I dedicated some time for actual “studying” or active learning (2-6 hours per week)

• Watched YouTube videos that explain pronunciation and grammar
• Googled articles about grammar
• Used a dictionary app to check up words and learn verb conjugations
• Read articles about subjects I enjoy
• Very occasionally spoke Spanish with my five Spanish-speaking friends
• Borrowed two books from the library for leisure reading (not grammar books!)

Things I did not do in the last seven months

I’m not saying that these are not effective. They are just not fun, that’s all!

• Study grammar textbooks
• Take any notes or write anything down
• Enroll in a class or online course
• Memorize verb tables to the point where I want to pull my hair out
• Listen to podcasts that teach Spanish
• Memorize lists of vocabulary words
• Do grammar exercises
• Use language learning apps like Duolingo
• Use flashcards or a flashcard app

Basically, I didn’t do anything boring—according to my definition of boring—and I integrated language learning into my daily schedule as much as possible.

To an extent, I still had to learn basic grammar and memorize verb tables—probably the driest part of this whole journey—but I did it in a way where I didn’t want to pull my hair out.

As I said, I focused on what was the most important, like only memorizing verb conjugations for the most commonly used pronouns first.

Now that I’m past the learning curve, what am I doing?

Right now, I don’t do very much active learning on a day-to-day basis. I listen to a Spanish podcast for 30 minutes every day (of which I can understand 60-90%) and listen to maybe 2-4 hours of Spanish music each week.

I’m smooth sailing with Spanish now!

My focus for the rest of the year is learning to read Chinese better but it’s honestly so challenging.

All my passive learning methods for Spanish don’t work anymore. But so far, I have changed my phone and all social media accounts to Chinese.

Earlier this year, I started volunteering with League of Innovators, a Canadian charity that promotes entrepreneurship and innovation in youth, and it has inspired me to be even more innovative in my language learning.

How can I learn to read Chinese in the most efficient way possible and make it fun? That’s something I’m working on.

Optional: If you’re curious what exactly I can say in Spanish… read on.

To give you an idea of where I am with my Spanish right now, I’m going to type out some of my thoughts about learning languages without using a dictionary or spell check.

If you know Spanish, forgive me for not using accents as I’ve ignored them the entire seven months, but I promise, I will eventually pay attention to them! I know they affect the stresses on the words. Forgive my grammar and spelling mistakes—sorry!

Translation to English follows.

Estoy muy feliz que has lei mi “blog post”. Espero que estas un poco inspirado a aprender una nueva idioma. No es facil, pero no es imposible. Si haces un poco cada dia, vas a ver que tu progresa es rapida.

Para mi, mi manera favorita de aprender una idioma es escuchar a la musica. No me gusta hacer de ejercicios de gramatico por que pienso que ellos son muy aburridos. Aprender una nueva idioma deberia ser divertido.

Entonces, puedes ver que ahora puedo communicar mis ideas pero tengo mucho errores gramaticos, jaja. Lo siento por mi espanol sin accentos. Te prometo que eventuelemente voy a aprender como utilisar los accentos cuando escribo. Un paso a la vez!

Dime en los comentarios que piensas del aprendisaje de idiomas!

Piensas que es posible que esto pueda ser divertido y no aburrido? (Hoping I used the subjunctive correctly…) 

Cual es tu experiencia con aprender idiomas? Quiero escuchar tus pensamientos!

Using Google Translate for the above Spanish into English: I am very happy that you have read my “blog post”. I hope you are a little inspired to learn a new language. It is not easy, but it is not impossible. If you do a little each day, you will see that your progress is fast.

For me, my favorite way to learn a language is to listen to music. I do not like doing grammar exercises because I think they are very boring. Learning a new language should be fun.

So, you can see that now I can communicate my ideas but I have a lot of grammatical errors, haha. I’m sorry for my Spanish without accents. I promise that eventually I will learn how to use the accents when I write. One step at a time!

Tell me in the comments what you think about language learning!

Do you think it is possible that this can be fun and not boring?

What is your experience with learning languages? I want to hear your thoughts!