Spanish Made Easy

Learning a new language is not particularly easy for most people. Spanish is one of the most popular languages for people to learn. They all want their lesson of Spanish made easy for them, but just how easy is Spanish for the average person to learn? 

It depends really on how difficult you want to make it. If you feel the need to conjugate the verb, hablar, down to say, the futuro anterior subjuntivo, then it does get a little bit complicated, at least at first sight. "Yo hubiere hablado," (I had spoken) may not seem difficult to construct, and it isn't really, but most "Spanish made easy" type of courses won't usually take you that far. 

Phrase books are great for creating a Spanish made easy, all in one, fit in the pocket, type of book. It's the sort of thing you can whip out and flip through pages rapidly to find the exact phrase you need in just about any situation. Or at least, that is what the advertising will tell you. 

The reality with phrase books is that they are rarely useful in real-life situations. By the time you find the phrase you need, and it will rarely be the exact phrase you need, and the situation has usually changed with a new phrase needed. 

Spanish made easy through the ubiquitous phrase book could be made a lot easier with just a little thought from the writers of these cheap and cheerful publications. A wonderful piece of logic found in one such book is, "No me recuerdo la palabra por…" (I have forgotten the word for…). Wouldn't it be the case that if you have actually forgotten the word for something, you will be unable to tell anyone the word you have forgotten?

In their quest for creating useful Spanish made easy phrase books, the writers often get carried away. When phrase books stick to offering simple words and short phrases, they work a lot better. Knowing how to say, "hello" and "good day," for example, is useful and easy. Even slightly more complicated sentences can work well too. Being able to say something like, "how much does this cost?" is very likely to have a practical use. 

In earlier times, Spanish tuition courses could be dry and boring. They were perfectly capable of teaching someone the language, but they tended to lack any kind of interesting content. These days most people want their Spanish made easy, they want to spend as little time as possible getting up to speed and being able to hold a conversation with a native Spanish speaker. 

The Internet has spawned some really excellent products to help in this regard. None of the sites tell you that they will make the conjugation of irregular Spanish verbs fun, for it simply isn't! They have found other ways to teach you the same thing, trying to inject interest and excitement into the learning curve. By and large they have succeeded, and Spanish made easy has become a reality with most of these courses.