Shooting for the vibe

I'm crap at learning anything off by heart. My memory's never been great, but these days it's in a sorry way. Trying to learn Ancient Greek and Hebrew over the last three years was a torturous experience - and now I have to learn Spanish.

I'm actually feeling fairly positive about this - I can already understand a fair bit of French and a little German and Italian, and I've listened to a heap of salsa music over the years. However I think that it will make things harder if I go about trying to connect each Spanish word to its English equivalent. That works if you can actually remember your vocabulary, but it's not much good for the likes of me. A friend suggested another way. Rather than giving each new word an English translation, you learn its definition in Spanish, using words you already know. That way the Spanish language holds together in your mind as an integrated whole, rather than a run of memorised words.

So I've ordered a primary school Spanish dictionary to help me in my quest. I've also got a book of short passages that will help me to skim-read and use the context to determine meaning. And I plan on watching lots of Spanish language films. I'll let you know how it goes.


H/T Ceanne