Jaja! De verdad. 😉

Hi Ron,
You’re absolutely right about changing up techniques and exercising the brain differently!
I recently learned this applies to physical training too; I spent two months working with a personal trainer whose MO was to keep the body in shock constantly by doing different exercises all the time; as long as we flex and work our muscles (brain included) in different ways, we keep growing!

Hi Gary,
You’re right – Duolingo will only get you so far.
If you want to take your Spanish to the next level, I firmly believe that private lessons are the only way to go. I recommend Live Lingua (which I write about in the post above), which you can do from anywhere in the world with a Skype connection.

Regarding French: Personally, I found that knowing some French helped me to learn Spanish in that I was already familiar with how to conjugate verbs, and how objects have masculine or feminine attributions.
While some French and Spanish words are similar, I haven’t necessarily found the languages to be interchangeable enough that I could use French to be understood in Spanish. But I’m glad that works for you!

Second, did you find that knowing French grammar helped in learning the Spanish grammar? It seems very similar to me. Two years of college French in the USA is my base of French knowledge. But, when someone appears to be especially perplexed at my attempt at Spanish, I often find that I have used a phrase in French, instead.

Hi Vitko,
Good on you for speaking three other languages! I am in amazement of people who speak more than two or three languages; so many words and linguistic rules rolling about in your head! Spanish was challenging enough 😉
ASSIMIL sounds interesting. I’ll look into that.

Interesting post! Learning to speak a foreign language properly, it’s a very hard work. Well done on becoming fluent in Spanish, it’s a lovely language, plus very useful. Apart from Spain, it’s spoken in Central and South America. But, there are colloquial differences between the Spanish version and those spoken in South America, although the structure of the language is the same. It’s just that they use different words and you have to learn the meaning, to be able to understand correctly.

I am Serbian and I’ve been living in England for a long time now. I also speak French, Italian and Spanish. These three languages, I studied by myself for years. It took a lot of time and effort. I used the French method ASSIMIL, which in my opinion is by far the best. They teach you in circles, the way a baby learns the mother tongue. And as the name of the course states, you assimilate the knowledge, which means it stays with you forever.

Finally, well done on encouraging other people to learn foreign languages, it’s all too easy with English nowadays, although being able to communicate with people in their own language is, in my opinion, priceless.

Thanks for the tip, Anil!