How to learn Spanish like you are living in Spain.

Posted by Garner McCloud on March 5, 2017

In the previous post, we talked about how it is possible to immerse yourself in Spanish without having to move to a foreign country. If you followed the steps at the end, you should have a bunch of Spanish resources that you can now use to live your daily life in Spanish. If you haven’t gathered those yet, go back to the previous guide and do that.

The next step is to create our daily action plan. We need to create this plan because:

  • It’ll make it easier to stay immersed in Spanish.
  • You’ll get to live the language as a native person would.

Not only do we need to create our daily action plan but we also need to make it easy to access all of our materials. I can’t emphasize enough that everything needs to be super accessible. When living in a new language, often you’ll run out of willpower and revert back to English if you can’t find what you want in Spanish.

Also, make sure you have a lot of resources, because sometimes you will get bored with one and you’ll need something to replace it with. If you don’t have anything to replace it with, again your default will be to just go back to English.

Time to Create Your Action Plan

Okay so now it is time to map out your daily routine and fill it in with Spanish resources. You need to go through each detail of your day and substitute the English items that you consume with the same ones in Spanish.

Make an outline of your day and those English items now. Do it on a piece of paper or in a text document.

Next, replace each of those items with the Spanish equivalents from the resources you gathered. If you can’t find a substitute for one of them, you need to gather some more Spanish resources, so take the time to do that now and then come back to this step.

Making your Action Plan Bulletproof

Now that we have our initial plan on how we can live in our own little Spanish world, we need to make it super easy to stay on this path. I'll mention this one more time: If it isn’t easy to access your Spanish resources, then you’ll most likely revert back to your English default life. Here are some examples of how I make it easy to access all of my Spanish resources.

I read the news in the morning. But I don’t know all of the Spanish news sites' links by heart. That's a problem, so I need to make sure I have the sites easily available so I can go to them. To make it easy, I created a bookmark folder with links to each site that I can automatically go to in my laptop and mobile browser.

Same goes for if you watch the news in the morning. You need to make sure you know the correct television stations so you can change to them. If you can't remember them, right them down on a sticky note next to the TV remote.

If you listen to music, make sure you have the playlists of your favorite Spanish songs saved so you can just start it up when you want it. If you listen to podcasts, make sure you subscribe to them and have them downloaded for easy listening.

For relaxing when you come home, make sure you have your list of shows available in Spanish ready to watch, books ready for reading, and videogames already available so you can access them easily.

Got all of that?

Now go ahead and double check that you have everything within reach when you need it. If you’ve done that, you’ve now setup your action plan to live immersed in Spanish without having to move!

Time to Live Your New Spanish Life

With that action plan, I challenge you to try to live immersed in Spanish for one week. Try not to do anything in English if you can. It'll be tough but you'll be amazed at how fun it is and how much you'll grow. Once the week is over, let everyone know how it went in the comment section below.

¡Buena suerte!




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