How I learned Spanish

I've been thinking about learning Spanish ever since I moved to Texas in 2016, and writing a novel set in Madrid at the end of the Spanish Civil War gave me the final motivation I needed, especially once I decided to see Madrid for myself during Thanksgiving 2018.

I bought Spanish I and II from The Great Courses and loved them (of course I didn't get started until the week before the trip and although I found out I loved the lectures by Dr. Bill Worden I only had time to cover five out of thirty of Spanish I before the trip). Because I am a native French speaker, I found that what helped me most was to learn Spanish verbs and how to conjugate them.

Once in Madrid, I got myself a variety of books in Spanish, especially museums catalogs and also Invierno en Madrid, which I had loved in its English translation (except for the last chapter and the epilogue). I will admit that my method to further my Spanish is a bit unorthodox, but I love it. I also got Cien años de soledad, which I already had in English, and once I was back in the U.S. I got the audiobook.

For a while my favorite way of learning Spanish was to re-read a couple of pages of Winter in Madrid and then read the equivalent in Spanish and circle the new words I wanted to put in my notebook with their translation. (Once a nerd, always a nerd.) The thing is, though, literary fiction does have quite a bit of fancy vocabulary, and I found my progress through the book slower than I wanted. So what to do, reader, what to do?

Here is the idea I came up with: read personal development books in Spanish. In those days of quarantine, we can also use a bit of strategic thinking for our life and career, and not only have I read all of them in English already, but I have such a memory that I actually remember most of them almost word for word. (I'm basically Rainwoman when it comes to memory, although play it down a lot.) The big difference with literary fiction is that the range of vocabulary is much narrower and many words in personal development in Spanish are basically the same as in French. So I'm reading Poder sin límites by Tony Robbins with the same ease as I'd read it in English or French, which I find really funny. This way I'm practicing my Spanish and refreshing my memory on some useful personal development concepts. Once I'm done with the Robbins book I want to read Los principios del éxito by Jack Canfield. I've read it multiple times in English since it first came out a decade ago, so that should be fun too.