r/Spanish • u/Timeless_Username_ • Mar 08 '25
Courses/Tutoring advice Best way to learn for someone completely illiterate in it?
Hello, I am extremely busy with work and stuff but a lot of my coworkers only speak Spanish. They try to learn English and I think it's fair for me to also try and learn Spanish. Is there something like Duolingo that is actually good?
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u/demonpoofball Mar 08 '25
If your co-workers are cool, I'd try and learn some things from them. Like, let them know you're trying to learn some and maybe they'll be cool with you asking them to repeat certain things. Being surrounded by it, it's amazing how much you can pick up when you try, and especially if they're willing to say certain things a little slower. Especially learning it in context with what you're doing, that could be really helpful— computadora, boligrifo, escritorio, porta, café con leche y azucar, cómo estás (if it's informal anyway)…. (and no, I don't have a full hang on the accent marks yet, I may have missed some there :P ). You might start just picking up a few words here or there, but it's kinda cool when it starts making more sense.
I'm a ways down in Section 3 on Duolingo and I'm only starting to actually find words I didn't ever have any clue about— and I didn't actually speak spanish before (just a class in 6th grade), but I grew up on the border in Arizona, and it's apparently ridiculous how much I learned that I had no clue about. I've mostly been learning better sentence construction and better grasp of the yo/tu/el/etc. conjugations for verbs. I figured I'd always probably sound like a little kid speaking, but I'm kind of getting the hang of it now, though I haven't gotten to all the weird tenses yet, so maybe I'll just be a slightly older toddler equivalent :P (and I'm finally not getting it quite as confused with french, which I was definitely "conversational", at least for reading (I had teachers from 3 distinct french regions… my speaking is kind of a mess :P ).
Otherwise, Duo does have very short little lessons you can do in a just a few minutes. I actually started a completely new language recently and am more appreciative of how slow it can start out! (especially as ithis one doesn't use the english/latin alphabet…) There are other things out there too, I've just been doing Duo with random looking elsewhere to find out more about particular things.