One Month Spanish
Your Guide:
MO TAHITI
One Month Spanish
Why It Works
If you completed each of the previous steps, you likely found that the conversation was much easier to understand by the end. This makes sense because of the work you have done in the previous steps -- studying the written dialogue, identifying any vocabulary words that did not know, and listening to the dialogue one line at a time.
By the time you finally listen to the full conversation again, you have already worked through the main issues that might prevent you from understanding the material.
-Melissa Brooks
Congratulations!
Now that you have finished the tutorial you are ready to dive in to the rest of the course. Click the button below to sign in and begin the course:
Why Do Most People Fail to Learn Conversational Spanish?
If you have ever purchased a typical Spanish book, or taken a Spanish course in college or high school, then you probably spent 90% of your time focused on vocabulary and grammar and less than 10% - if any - actually hearing and speaking Spanish out loud.

You probably even thought that this made sense - you have to learn lots of words before you start learning how to speak, right? 

The truth is you need relatively few words to be able to get through a typical Spanish conversation. Based on an analysis of the frequency distribution of words in Spanish, a person with a vocabulary of only 1000 words would be able to recognize about 88% of the Spanish used in everyday conversation. 

In fact, if you learned only the 600 most commonly used words, you would be able to understand about 80-85% of the words in spoken Spanish - enough to get through most basic conversations. 

The real problem for most beginner to intermediate Spanish learners is that there is a significant gap between their "paper" vocabulary - the number of words they can recognize on paper - and their ability to understand the same words in real-time spoken conversation.

To see what we mean, try the following exercise from our conversational Spanish course One Month Spanish. 

The audio clip below contains a short dialogue between a man and the bellhop at his hotel. Most of the words used in the dialogue should be familiar to students who know a modest amount of Spanish vocabulary.

Listen to the clip below and see how well you can understand the discussion. 

Note: Be sure to listen to the audio before reading the transcript that follows.
CUSTOM JAVASCRIPT / HTML
Once you have finished listening to the clip, click the button below to show the written transcript:
Compare your results: Did you understand the material better through listening or reading?
 
If you answered "reading" then your issue is not lack of sufficient vocabulary, but rather your inability to mentally process oral speech as quickly as the written word.

If you want to improve your ability to understand oral Spanish, the answer is not just learning more and more vocabulary, but rather improving your ability to recognize and understand the Spanish that you already know.

In the next section, we'll show you how to take advantage of a little known, but highly effective technique designed to help you understand spoken Spanish as easily as if you were seeing the words printed on paper. 
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