Don’t Become Discouraged

There will be times during the learning process when you feel that things are dragging a bit. This is completely natural, and it specifically tends to happen a few weeks in, when the initial novelty and surprising early progress have exhausted themselves. It is by persisting through these tricky times that you will gain the most important tool for a language learner – patience.

Yes, it’s certainly easier to learn when you’re having fun, and there are ways to increase the fun factor, but how you deal with the stage where it becomes boring will define you as a language learner – if you can stick with it, you’ll do well, not least because a key element of language learning is repetition!

Your progress is sure to be a surprise at first, because from knowing nothing to knowing a little bit feels comparatively like a real leap – and it is. It’s only normal, then, that when progress slows down you’ll become a little disconcerted. Therefore it’s worth setting yourself little goals. Master the little bit of grammar that was causing you to become frustrated.

Try putting all the Spanish you’ve learnt so far into an introduction – you can then see how far you’ve come, and give yourself the confidence to beat those demons. Confidence, more than anything, is the key to learning a language. Patience is certainly important, but without confidence it will only mean you repeatedly make mistakes and get all the more discouraged. Confidence allows you to learn from those mistakes.

Find ways to bring Spanish into your everyday life. Using the Internet, find a Spanish radio station that offers live streaming, and hear the language being spoken. Once you start hearing the language more often, it will become easier to replicate the sounds speakers make. That is simply invaluable.