Whackiest Ways Of Building Spanish Around You

An insane amount of Spanish language input is warranted for any sustainable level of fluency and an insane amount of input calls for insane methods. If your imagination is wild enough, you will see there are more ways of building Spanish around you in your home country than an ignorant expat living in Spain or Mexico could enjoy. This article is all about exploring some of the whackier and unconventional immersion methods. These practices will change your lifestyle in some of the most radical ways but they come with a promise of native-like fluency in the most organic way. The good news is, they are all easy to implement!

Spanish language in your chores

Add a touch of Spanish to your daily chores
Photo credit: David Reber licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

This is simple. Just take time to draw a time-table for your daily activities and put up copies on your fridge, your bedroom wall, your study, everyplace practically possible in your vicinity. The only twist is that this horario (time-table) must be in Spanish.

Use aids if you need to – dictionary, online translation service, whatever you require. Just be sure to refer to it before starting any activity (like, doing the dishes, doing yardwork, having breakfast, doing laundry, and so on) on a daily basis.

Repeatedly seeing the Spanish of what you are going to do, even passively, will help you unknowingly assimilate a lot of Spanish into your lifestyle without any groundbreaking efforts. Change your schedule once in a while to reflect new priorities and absorb new vocabularies as easily.

By the way, as convention, time-tables in Spanish use verbs in their most original, unconjugated form, i.e., the infinitive. This should make life easier for you and help you absorb Spanish verbs without being put-off by distracting conjugations. If, however, you feel this method is working for you better than expected, it won’t hurt to experiment with conjugations a little even if that means going against the norm. All that matters is that you should be learning Spanish – regardless of how.

Talk to yourself...in Spanish

Befriend your shadow and learn Spanish
Photo credit: oddharmonic licensed CC BB-SA 2.0

Now this one is seriously whacky. You run the risk of quickly being labeled loco (crazy) doing this especially if you don’t live alone. This idea involves you using Spanish with yourself for a few minutes everyday (the longer, the better) where you play the parts of two people in a dialog. For example, you first ask a question to an imaginary friend and then play the part of that imaginary friend and answer the question to yourself.

Doing this in Spanish is extremely beneficial to you if you have some amount of experience with basic Spanish already. Try to perform these rehearsals in front of un espejo (a mirror) for a slightly better impact as you can easily monitor your facial expressions while speaking Spanish this way. The best thing about this technique is that you will no more depend on another native speaker in order to practise your Spanish, particularly helpful to those who live in places like India or Mongolia.

This activity can easily go hand-in-hand with the previous one, i.e., drawing time-table in Spanish. Try talking to yourself about each of the to-do on your list before actually doing them, using your current level of grammar and vocabulary. You might also consider making it more amusing by adding some nonsense to your monologues, e.g., slangs, etc. That way, you also soak up some useful colloquialism as you go. Too many birds with one stone? Your creativity is the only limit to how immersive your Spanish can get.

Sing to yourself in Spanish

Singing in Spanish is both engaging and educative
Photo credit: Brian Kelley licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

This is a slight modification over the previous idea of talking to yourself. Since music is the most entertaining teacher, singing to yourself in Spanish is an excellent way of weaving Spanish into your life.

For this, of course, it is important that you first listen to Spanish songs, a lot of Spanish songs...in fact, only Spanish songs. And there are enough number of masterpieces in every genre in Spanish to ensure you don’t feel too nostalgic about English. Sing while in the bath, sing while in the kitchen, sing while sitting on the can. There are ample number of moments that could be effectively invested to this wonderful immersion technique.

You can start by murmuring some familiar Spanish song and then, to make it even more effective, graduate to singing the same song with a slightly modified lyrics using any newly acquired vocabulary. There’s no better way of absorbing new words in Spanish. You don’t have to make absolutely perfect sense with your experimental lyrics so feel free to play around. Just make sure you do this only in Spanish and do it a lot! And, of course, you definitely don’t need to be a good singer as long as you can stand your own voice.

Spanish language in online research

We all have used the Internet in varying degrees for researching random items of interest and one online resource that has grown synonymous to research is Wikipedia. Despite the slight cloud that hangs over it’s accuracy and content validity, we must admit Wikipedia is an essential tool in our online research arsenal.

The good thing about Wikipedia is that it is available in more languages than can even be listed down and Spanish is one of them. So, switching to Wikipedia in Spanish will immensely add to not only our Spanish vocabulary and knowledge of specialized jargon in Spanish, but also add a new dimension to your immersion.