After reading the blog for a while, how do you think you should learn Spanish? By reading a lot? Listening a lot? Watching TV as much as you can? Speaking? Wrong, wrong, wrong… WRONG! Sure, you should read, listen, watch TV and eventually speak, but that won’t make you fluent. You know what does?
Imitating! Think about it; you listen Spanish for hours and hours, watch TV all day long, every day. But in the end, can you speak? Well, sure you can a bit, but you won’t sound native if you keep trying to come up with your own sentences. Coming up with your own sentences sucks! Trying to come up with your ‘unique intonation’ sucks even harder!
The key is to imitate native speakers. Often this goes automatically because you get a huge amount of input in the form of radio, television and listening to conversations, but often it won’t go that way. And why are you messing it up? Because you want to be unique. But hey, it’s possible that you’re unique and special, but you’re not in Spanish. No, in Spanish you’re simply going to imitate you friends, television and phrases from songs. Why?
Because that’s pretty much the best, if not the only, way to really sound like a native. Take me for example; I sound like a native mainly because I use expressions and words natives use. People call me albaceteño or hellinero (I lived in Hellín for a while) even though I’m not even Spanish! It’s simply because I use certain slang that’s unique to that region which in turn is because I always imitate people. I know it sounds lame, but it works and natives don’t mind you imitate their way of speaking.
Next to that you should copy the intonation of you Spanish friends. Again, it sounds lame but they’re natives and you are not. So who sounds better? You or them? Don’t be a smart-ass and copy their accent.
Kids don’t come up with their own sentences and accent, they imitate their peers, who imitate their parents. If your kid has many friends that swear, he or she will swear within no time as well. If your kid plays with British kids, and I mean a lot, he or she will be able to speak with a British accent as well. We’re no kids, but often we don’t lose our ability to imitate someone. It’s there, like… forever.
So listening and simply repeating the stuff you’ve heard is essential. People don’t mind if you take over their way of speaking; they don’t even notice. Another thing I did and almost forgot (until reading this comment of Noah) is carrying is small notepad. And mine was really small; big enough to fill with hundreds of words and expressions and small enough to bring with me everywhere I went. And I’m not talking about getting obsessed with writing down everything – that becomes old really soon – but rather words you don’t hear a lot (like payo, which I didn’t know until hanging out with some gitanos).
The best thing of imitating is that it’s effortless. You don’t have to worry about grammar, certain words, your accent; if you simply take over an entire sentence or a big part of a sentence and try to produce it with the same intonation (which is weird to do, but also great fun at the same time) you’re imitating pretty much effortless. And the more you imitate, the more it’ll become your own way of speaking and you won’t have to imitate anymore.
If you want to know more about imitating in language learning and why you should imitate, you have to read this article by Khatzumoto. He talks about Japanese, but the imitating stuff is there to be applied to any language out there.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Excellent article, Ramses. Imitating is a great way to learn, and best of all – it works!
Ramses,
I’m glad my comment joggled your memory. I would pull my notebook out so often that it started to become part of my identity. What killed it for me though (and I’ve only recently gotten back to carrying a notebook around with me, albeit for other reasons) was when I lived in Rio de Janeiro and all I would wear were board shorts that didn’t have any pockets so no place to put it. It was a price I was willing to pay though
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As for imitating, I’ve definitely done this with friends of mine where I started to adopt their accent, but I also find that I’ve done this a lot with music. I think you have to be conscious of the limitations of this, because sometimes when people are singing, their accent, or the words they use, aren’t the same as if they were speaking. That said, I’m already memorizing words and singing them back to myself when I’m listening to music, so I’ve found that it’s a perfect space to be able to mimic different accents (on top of storing up examples of grammar and vocabulary usage).
I also find that I tend to pick up several different accents and I personally like playing around with them. Since I’m speaking a second language, no accent is really “my accent,” so I feel like it gives me the liberty to try different accents on at different times. I get to have all kinds of identities, it’s one of my favorite things about learning new languages.
Serious good points! I have a student in my Spanish 102 class who is frustrated because she can’t communicate with native speakers, even though she does ALL the exercises in the textbook and workbook (most of which aren’t even assigned). I will have her read this post!
This is exactly my experience.
I am a native English speaker and am learning Catalan. I obviously don’t have a very good Catalan accent when I speak the language but my girlfriend (who is Catalan) says that I sound most Catalan when I do an impression of the guy on the Learn Catalan CD that I have.
So my plan now is to try to imitate any Catalan speakers that I can (friends, TV celebs etc) until this ‘way of speaking’ becomes natural and is just the way I speak.
Thank you for this artical!But problem is you did not tell how immitate .It is undestandeble ,we can immitate natives (looks a litle strange during a meeting?),but what your suggestion about immitate dialogs in movies ?Did you do this or doing now with French?Sorry,I always ask you,but I think a lot of people have some questions too.I study English what you suggestion is it possible use your senteses inorder to improve English? Thaks again.
Kitty: exercises will make you good at making excercises, but not at producing real speech. Let her listen to real materials, like A LOT and only THEN have her imitate natives.
Jim: I noticed I was good at imitating when I tried to imitate some gitanos and my Spanish friends couldn’t tell the difference. So from then on I just copied them and now I sound good
. You can tackle all the sounds in a language, but there are always things like intonation that are ready to bite you in the butt.
Andy: It’s a bit complicated as I don’t exactly know how I imitate. I always liked imitating accents in Dutch and English and just got better in it for Spanish. I’ll try to explain how I do it though, in a future post.