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Learning Spanish, the language is learned quickly, isn’t it?

Learning Spanish

Learning Spanish, the language is learned quickly, isn’t it?

The headline alone makes me smile. With exactly this thought I went to the thing.

How hard can that be?! Spanish, I had that at school once. Unfortunately, the whole thing was 15 years ago and after that I never heard the language again, let alone spoke it. In summary, I can say that I reset to factory settings when I arrived in Cancun with my suitcase.

I’ve always been pretty good at memorizing, but I’ve never liked books.
That’s why I decided to load the application “ Babbel ” onto my cell phone and learn about it. So I was able to decide for myself when, what and how much I wanted to learn or what I wanted to repeat.
I think this app is really great and I learned the words and grammar rules really quickly with it.

Unfortunately, I neglected to do that

I am now in Mexico. The national language is basically Spanish, correct, but the Mexicans meanly have their own vocabulary and sometimes use the grammar differently. You will have the same problem in Argentina or Colombia. For example, we watched the series “ Narcos ”. Without Spanish subtitles, my boyfriend wouldn’t have understood much either, and I certainly wouldn’t have understood it at all.

The Babbel App teaches European Spanish, such as that spoken in Madrid. European Spanish is also pronounced differently, using the tongue a lot there. That doesn’t exist in Mexico, for example. For my boyfriend as a Mexican and now also for me, this accent sounds like the Bavarian, Austrian or Swiss accent for us Germans. One understands, but it is more difficult to understand.

Without wanting to bore you with the details, there are many differences and it took a lot of nerves for me to learn this language on my own. “ Babbel ” helped me learn the basics of Spanish.

The slang and the ‘typical Mexican

Words and concepts” I was only able to learn through Netflix and many conversations.

At this point, my tip for anyone who wants to learn Spanish is to listen to Spanish radio, Spanish music and watch Spanish films (preferably with German subtitles).

At first it must have been quite a torture for my boyfriend to hear me speak Spanish, but that’s the only way to learn a language. Talk, talk, talk and never get discouraged!

It’s easy for me to talk, of course, because I live in Mexico and I’m forced to speak Spanish. Alternatively, however, there are many groups with German or German via Facebook, for example. Spanish native speakers. There you can exchange ideas and also make phone calls via Skype and learn to speak step by step.

Currently I understand Spanish very well and also speak it

fluid. However, I didn’t find it particularly easy to learn it and by that I don’t mean ordering bread from the baker in Spanish. I figured that out in a day. It takes a long time to get used to the language and to be able to speak you need a lot of words that you have to learn first.

Especially the first few months in Mexico for birthdays or other events were just terrible for me. I felt like I had speech spasms, stuttered and probably pronounced the words more than wrong. I don’t even need to talk about embarrassment. I’m a total chatterbox by nature and I hated not being able to participate in conversations. That goes completely against my nature. I wanted to, but I didn’t understand anything.

I’m so glad to be able to be myself again, even if I still make a few grammatical mistakes these days or speak Mexican slang with a German accent, I can take it with humor and laugh at myself.

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