Learning Spanish: Consistency and Persistence

Consi words came from Christian Dasilva, my Spanish teacher when it came to learning Spanish. Christian and I meet on Zoom twice a week for an hour. He started a language school from his location in Colombia and now has trainers and students around the globe.

I’m blessed to have my 1:1 with him—a lucky stroke of meeting one of his prime students who introduced us.

Christian is an amazing man who has not only survived but thrived from a childhood of incredible mistreatment and torture at the hands of a stepfather. He fled from Venezuela and taught himself English. But more than ‘just English '.

The Challenges of Learning Spanish

He knows all the intricacies of English: English is considered easy to learn on a basic level, but difficult to master due to several key features:

• Irregular Spelling and Pronunciation: Spelling often does not match how words sound, with many silent letters (e.g., knife, gnome) and groups of letters that change pronunciation wildly (e.g., through, rough, trough).

• Massive Vocabulary and Loanwords: English borrows words from many different languages (Latin, Greek, French, German), resulting in hundreds of thousands of synonyms and confusing word pairs.

• Phrasal Verbs and Idioms: Combining a simple verb with a preposition completely changes its meaning (e.g., give up, give in), and figurative idioms require total memorization.

• Rule Exceptions: Common rules like "I before E, except after C" have numerous counterexamples (science, weird), alongside many irregular past-tense verbs (fight becomes fought).

• Strict Word Order: English relies heavily on a strict Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order and specific, unwritten rules for adjective placement that can be hard to explain or teach.

• Context-Dependent Stress: Changing syllable stress or pitch within the same word can alter its part of speech or meaning (e.g., present vs. present)

OK, now that you are overwhelmed, Christian also told me that Spanish is actually harder to master than English. Hmmmm. In January, I’ll tell you how to enroll in his Spanish class.