Unique Spanish Advice You’ve Never Heard of [for Beginners]

Are you looking for some different Spanish tips and tricks as a beginner Spanish learner? Do want to learn Spanish quickly? If I had to begin and start my Spanish learning journey all over again, these are the things I would tell my beginner self. This is advice that might be different from the usual things you hear regularly on YouTube or in Spanish class. Give yourself an edge over the typical beginner!

Change Your Phone to Spanish

Change your phone to Spanish as soon as possible! I changed my phone to Spanish about 2 months in my language learning journey (when I was still warming up with Duolingo). I eventually went a step further and changed my laptop and all my devices into my target language!

Unless you’re living in a Spanish-speaking country, this is the number one advice I have for you. I promise you it’s only uncomfortable for about a week, but after that it feels very natural. Because you use your phone everyday, you’ll already know how to navigate through your phone subconsciously. You’ll pick up a lot words really fast (particularly if you have some basic sentence structures learned). You’ll also start to see ads in Spanish as you browse the internet, which is a nice bonus.

Note: Be sure to consciously read the words, or you might just default to muscle memory.

Immerse & Use the Language

This will be useful even once you’ve reached fluency. You must immerse and use the language, even as a beginner in the Spanish language. I recommend that you spend most of your time finding material that you enjoy (like music, books, or movies), and just listen/look at it and enjoy. Eventually, as you begin to look up words that you don’t understand, you’ll naturally understand more and more. Immerse in the language as soon as possible, and try to write basic sentences about your day to see what gaps you currently have.

Don’t Learn All the Conjugations

…just yet. In one of the best Spanish textbooks for language learning, Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, Madrigal explains that this is how she teaches all of her students.

Learn one form of conjugation at a time (e.g only learning present, past & future “Yo” verb endings). You should try to form as many sentences with the vocabulary and grammar that you’re learning, without varying the subject you’re conjugating for. This will help you get use to the sound of each subject’s verb endings, even if you’re only writing. When it comes to listening, you’ll automatically have a built in gut-feeling for the subject you’ve been conjugating for (e.g if you’ve been learning “Yo” conjugations, when you hear that -o or -é sound, you’ll intuitively know the sentence is about “Yo”). If I had the opportunity to teach someone Spanish, this is where I would start them off!

Learn the Subjunctive from the Start

You may not even know what the subjunctive is at this point. A quick TL;DR: Spanish has an whole extra series of conjugations to express wishes, desires, hopes, and things of that sort. Don’t think too much about this definition too hard right now.

I want you to learn the Spanish subjunctive because you run into this form quite frequently (e.g I started off this paragraph with a sentence that would take the subjunctive in Spanish. “I want you to learn the Spanish subjunctive” would use the subjunctive word “aprendas“!) I use to try to dance around this when I would practice outputting the language, but learning the most common subjunctive triggers from the get go will help you sound more natural already!

Learn Common Prefixes & Suffixes

In English, we have prefixes that help automatically give us quick information, like “re-” meaning “to do again” or “de-” meaning “down” or even “pre-” meaning “before”. Guess what? This exists in Spanish (as well as in many other languages) as well! I wish someone had told me to learn these, because that would have supercharged my Spanish. This website has a great list of the most common prefixes/suffixes in Spanish. It’s definitely worth studying!

Final Thoughts

Learning your first foreign language isn’t easy. Hopefully these unique and useful beginner Spanish tips will be beneficial to your journey and help you reach a higher level of Spanish much sooner. Be sure to follow me on Pinterest to keep up with all my foreign language resources & feel free to comment down below about anything!