8 Easy Ways to Immerse Yourself

People often complain that it’s hard to immerse yourself in the Spanish language if you don’t live in a Spanish speaking country or work with hispanohablantes on a daily basis. What they forget is that there are some easy ‘hacks’ to immerse yourself more than ever.

1. Listen Spanish music only. This sounds logical and it is logical, but most people simply don’t do it and stick to their English language music. Change this once and for all and get a huge boost in terms of immersed time.
2. Set your computer to Spanish. If you run Microsoft Windows this may cost you some money, but it’s by all means worth the money; there are so many things an Operating System tells you that it’s a great way to learn new (specialized) vocabulary.
3. Read websites in Spanish only. Are you a news junky? Why don’t you read all of your news in Spanish then? Sites like ElPais.es and ElMundo.es are great places to get all your news in Spanish. Setting Google and YouTube to Spanish will give you results in Spanish first, which is a great way to get pretty much all your information in Spanish.
4. Get Spanish television. The internet is a great place to get Spanish series or watch live television in Spanish, but getting a satellite dish with several channels in Spanish is probably the best choice you can make in order to immerse yourself.
5. Read books in Spanish. MANY books. It’s a pity to see that many people don’t read anymore, because reading books -especially when learning a language- can greatly boost your overall understanding of a language. Where a movie or show is very fast-paced, you can always go back when reading a book and look up words and expressions, add them to your SRS or simply enjoy reading a work in its original language. But if you like reading in your own language you should really consider reading in Spanish as it’s one of the easiest ways to immerse yourself (you can pretty much always carry a book with you).
6. Meet natives. Although meeting natives can be a bit tricky, there are always places where hispanohablantes gather. A great starting point could be Instituto Cervantes which has librarie all over the world where mostly work natives. The people there can often help you finding places where Spaniards and Latinos meet and like to speak with everyone who’s learning Spanish.
7. Ask your Spanish-speaking friends to speak Spanish. If you live outside the hispanosphere but have Spanish-speaking friends it may be weird to speak Spanish. I have several Andalusian friends in the Netherlands and we only really speak Spanish when we don’t want others to understand us (which is rude, but okay…). Still, simply speaking Spanish -always, no matter what- is an easy and fun way to immerse yourself even more.
8. Follow Spanish Twitter users. If you’re like me, you spend quite some time on Twitter every day. Although it’s a medium that’s mostly dominated by English-language users, there’s also a huge Spanish speaking community. So for easy immersion it’d be good to follow some interesting hispanohablantes.

Tagged as: how to, immersion, language learning, Methods