Spanish

I've been learning Spanish for the past two years. I used to live in Spain, now I go to regular language meetups plus a language Tandem [1] once a week. Spanish is a really fun language to speak. There's something about the way it flows that you just don't really get with English or German. And there's lots of quirky expressions, especially in peninsular (European) Spanish. For instance when Spaniards want to convey that a situation was really dire, they might say: Éramos pocos, y parió la abuela. Literally: We were few and grandma gave birth.
¡Qué asco!

A note on Pronunciation

This is going to be armchair linguistics here, but hear me out. I think it's really very important to train pronunciation very early on. Especially for Germanic language speakers, who have very different habits in how we move our tongue in the mouth while speaking. Every language, when spoken, wears down a bit. For example, a lot of people won't actually say "I want a glass of water please", but they'll say something like "I wanna glassuhwater please". We take off the rough edges of the language in everyday speech. Spanish is no exception, for example you'll hear a lot of people say what sounds like cansao instead of cansado. Spanish consonants tend to be pronounced at the front of the mouth, and the "D" sound is made by touching the tip of the tongue to the upper front teeth. So when a "D" lands between two vowels like in cansado it will often be pronounced so softly that it virtually disappears. If you make an effort to pronounce all the sounds in the right places, this will start to happen to you naturally. You'll also be saying cansao without even realizing, because it's just easier.

Now here comes my armchair linguistic theory. I think correct pronunciation also makes it a lot easier to understand spoken Spanish. Your brain will pick up words more easily because you get an intuition for what is happening in the other person's mouth. There is some indication in neuroscience for this. There is something called a mirror neuron in our brains, that fires when we see other people move, and basically copies their movement into our brain, giving us a subconscious idea of what it would be like to move like that. Those neurons also exist in a part of the brain that does language, and they're theorized to play a role in language formation in kids. Now I don't know if that actually has anything to do with my pronunciation-understanding theory, and I'm probably not the first person to come up with this either. But I think it's definitely worth trying, even if just so you won't look like a complete Gringo/Guiri.

Spanish learning Materials

Here are the resources I used and am still using to improve my Spanish:

🎧 Podcasts

Lightspeed Spanish Podcast [rss]
Duolingo Podcast Spanish [rss]
Favorite Episode:
El perro que protestó: This episode tells the story of the world famous Chilean protest dog Negro Matapacos. I think they don't mention that name on the duolingo podcast though, for obvious reasons. But aside from that omission, it was a really good episode. It was nice to hear his caretaker talk about him in her own voice, fleshing out the story of the dog with the red bandana from the photos and murals.
Radio Ambulante[rss]
Favorite Episode:
El niño de las preguntas: This one tells the story of a gifted kid in Argentina and his and his parents' struggles with the educational system. It hit very close to home for me. Very validating for people who grew up struggling with all the issues that come with giftedness, but also a good intro for those who aren't familiar with the topic.

📚 Books | Libros

Teknochtitlán

A science fiction antology of stories written by Mexican authors. The reviews are relatively bad, but I liked it overall. I think the bad reviews are mostly the publisher's fault. The book's title and its subtitle "30 visiones de la ciencia ficción mexicana" might give the impression that it has more connection to Mexico itself and to Mexican indigenous culture. Not all the stories are set in Mexico, and not all of them even have Mexicans in them. Also the quality varies widely, but if you are just looking for some entertaining Sci-Fi short stories, this will do the trick.

Schaffler, Federico Ed. (2015) Teknochtitlán: 30 visiones de la ciencia ficción mexicana, ISBN:9786078222803

Ansibles, Perfiladores y otras Máquinas de Ingenio

This one is not an antology, but a Sci-Fi short story collection by a single author, also from Mexico. As a whole, I liked it quite a bit more than Teknochtitlán. Most characters are women, which is a breath of fresh air for me after reading mostly classic Sci-Fi (yes, I'm also looking at you, Ursula…). The stories are definitely more focused on the relationships than on the tech, and when the tech comes up, it's mostly in regards to how it effects people and their relationships. For instance when the protagonist has to grapple with the fact that it's part of her job to enter into rich people's mind to falsify their memories after they have committed a crime so they would be immune from police mind reading. Overall a fun book where the tech plays a supporting role to the often very quiet human interpersonal drama.

de Lourdes Chapela, Andrea (2022) Ansibles, Perfiladores y otras Máquinas de Ingenio , ISBN:8412520521

🎞️ Shows | Series

So this might sound weird, but at least for me it's a lot easier to follow shows that are dubbed into Spanish than ones that are originally Spanish. I don't why exactly, it's probably something about the way that voice actors pronounce their lines. So right now I'm still mostly watching non-Spanish or Latin American shows in Spanish. I'll list some that I've watched in Spanish and that have subtitles and dubs. The French/German TV channel ARTE also has a bunch of documentaries and videos in Spanish.

🔃 Dictionaries | Diccionarios

Diccionario de la Real Academia Española
The dictionary of the institution that publishes the "official" standard of the Spanish language. Whatever that's supposed to mean.
SpanishDictionary.com
The website feels somewhat bloated, but it shows you all the tenses when you look for a verb, which can be super useful.
Deepl, Yandex translate, Google translate
Conventional translation websites, I'm sure you can find them yourself. They're bloated and full of AI gimmicks, but sometimes there's no other way if there's no native speaker at hand.
Wiktionary.org in Spanish
Wikipedia for words. It has etymology notes for many words, which is a) useful and b) very fun for people with a certain kind of brain (me).

✏️ Other Resources

When you start learning the language, you'll obviously need to learn a lot of words and I mean a lot. According to some random website I found, it's 2000 for CEFR level B1, the first level where you'll be able to have something that resembles a conversation with someone. A native speaker uses about 10.000 different words. For the first year or so, I was drilling vocab for at least 20 Minutes every day, 10 new words a day. It might not sound like a lot, but it piles up quickly if you also need to practice all of the words you have learned during the weeks before. To make that easier, I used a flashcard app called Anki.

A screenshot showing some phrases in English and German in the center, with buttons saying "Again", "Hard", "Good" and "Easy" at the bottom. There are several other User Interface Elements for editing flashcards and interacting with the Program visible as well
This is what Anki for desktop looks like

Flashcard apps are apps that will show you a bunch of cards with words or expressions on them, that you'll have to recall, and depening on how you did, you tick them off as either failed or successfully recalled. Then the next day it will automatically show you the cards that you still need some practice on, until you can easily recall them. The cool thing about Anki is that it's free for Android phones, Linux, Windows and MacOS and that it has a super sophisticated algorithm that saves you time by not bothering you with words you already know. And on top of all that it's FLOSS and you don't even need an account to use it!

Anki doesn't come with preinstalled cards, so there's a extra step before you can start studying. You have two basic options: Either you make your own cards, or you download a free ready made deck from Ankiweb.net. Making your own cards can be useful if you are taking Spanish classes where you need to know a certain list of words for an exam. Otherwise I would recommend using a premade deck of cards. I am linking the decks I used in the list below. There is one for vocab (in German and Spanish) and one for conjugations. I'm also linking a website that is basically an online textbook for Spanish grammar (also in German).