Journey of learning Spanish

Dear Shiny,

        I spent the whole last year studying Spanish, and now I come up with some thoughts on the journey of learning Spanish, which I really want to share with you because I heard from you that Spanish is on your list of learning foreign languages. I hope that my experience can help you decide what foreign language you are going to learn. Spanish is the world’s fourth-most spoken language, after English, Mandarin Chinese and Hindi, so you will find that Spanish is one of the most popular foreign languages chosen to be learned by NCCU students. Fortunately, to some degree, Spanish is similar to English, especially the spelling of vocabulary. For example, in Spanish, “University” is spelled as “Universidad”. Although their pronunciation is different, it is quite similar in spelling, so it is not hard to memorize this vocabulary. All in all, what I want to say is that if you have the foundation of English, it won’t be very difficult for you to learn Spanish, for you just need to figure out its grammar, which is not very complicated, and you don’t have to spend plenty of time memorizing its vocabularies. However, it is easier to learn Spanish based on the foundation of English doesn’t mean that it is also easier to learn Spanish well. For me, the situation that I struggled with memorizing English vocabularies and figuring out its grammar happened a long time ago; it seems like I almost forget how hard I used to try to learn English well and how frustrated I felt at that time, and with the time goes by, the more I learn about English, the less effort and time I need to spend on learning, which makes me now think it is not that hard to learn English well. It is the phenomenon which forgetting those difficult parts of learning English leads me to think that master English is not so hard that boosts my confidence in believing I can learn and master a foreign language just like what I had done in English learning.

        However, such confidence will be broken when you start to learn Spanish. Just think about we spent plenty of years and effort learning English so that we can get here, in the department of English. Even you are getting smarter as you grow older, it is still almost impossible for you to learn Spanish really well just because you take one class 3 hours per week for learning Spanish. If you want to learn Spanish as well as what you have done in English in 3 or 4 years which is way less than the time you study in English, you have to pay lots of effort, really a lot, way more than you used to pay in English learning. This is the mental preparation you may want to have and the bad side of learning Spanish that I would like to tell you. But don’t worry. Of course, there is a good side, that is, having confidence is always a good thing. Only when you trust yourself can you succeed. If you have strong confidence in believing you can learn Spanish and are willing to pay efforts, I strongly support you and believe that you can get to your goal. So, this is pretty much what I want to share with you. Hope you can make your decision really soon.