The Telenovela Method of Learning Spanish

I know a guy who learned to speak fluent Spanish with a perfect Mexican accent while working as a line cook at an Applebees in Texas (he decided to do this because everyone else in the kitchen was a native Spanish speaker with very limited English skills), and the method he used is…interesting, funny, and just plain damn ingenious all at the same time.

What Is recommend to do is incorporate this method into your current learning system, as opposed to doing it exclusively, but I do think it’s probably worth spending 30-60 minutes on per day–if you do that you’ll probably work wonders in a couple months’ time.

What he had to work with from the get-go was the basic grammar and very little vocabulary he remembered from high school Spanish classes from 20 years prior.  He had DirectTV and what he would do is choose a telenovela (soap opera) on Univision and record a one hour episode of it on Tivo (you can watch these online now, see our list of sites to find TV online).  

Now, he would play back the episode and, pausing every few seconds, write down verbatim one or two minutes worth of dialog. Then, he would go through those two or three paragraphs of dialogue and learn absolutely everything he needed to completely understand what was being said–definitions, grammar, idioms, expressions, everything. He would try saying the lines himself, then immediately replay the character saying the line, then rewind, say it again, replay – he would keep this up until he sounded exactly like the actor (and consequently had excellent pronunciation after a very short period of time).  

This might take him a couple of days because although he could look up definitions and grammar online, often times he would need to consult with a native speaker either via a Spanish or language learning forum or someone he knew from work.  He would really learn absolutely everything he could about those few sentences to the point of memorization.  

When you do this yourself, keep in mind that the characters will occasionally use incorrect grammar that you will need to identify and note along with the correct version of what they said.

He would initially get through one 30 minute show every few weeks but quickly accelerated because he was learning so much at such a rapid pace.  After about a year of this he was completely fluent which, when you think about just how much conversational Spanish he was exposed to and forced himself to learn, isn’t really surprising.  Persistence, persistence, persistence

The telenovelas, along with movies, are very good method. The Spanish is colloquial, but not extremely formal, technical, obscure, or difficult; and there’s a wide variety of characters who you would actually encounter if you were living in a Spanish-speaking country who speak Spanish at very different levels: children, mechanics, housewives, doctors, street hustlers, and beggars. Jijiji...  

Eso es todo por ahora amigos, Enjoy your spanish learning!