I’ve been pretending to learn Spanish for many years now. I’ve done apps, like Duolingo, done Rosetta Stone, I drill regularly on the SpanishDict site, as well as reading their discussions and r/Spanish on Reddit. I’ve read Fluent Forever and taken several aspects of the method into my practice, and done a couple of Spanish in One Month workshops. Still, I’ve never gained the confidence to start speaking Spanish to people. That’s my goal for the second half of this year; to find somebody to speak to in Spanish, perhaps through an exchange site like italki.
I’ve found value in most of the methods noted above. In particular, I really enjoyed the early focus on grammar in the Spanish in One Month workshops. But nothing has jazzed me as much as the discovery of Language Transfer. I am not far into the program yet, so I cannot speak to how effective it is over the long term for actually achieving fluency. But the system, which is unlike any of the others so far, is absolutely delightful for somebody like me who loves language in general, including linguistics, etymology, and history.
You start by learning to identify words that have come into English from Latin. Most, if not all, these words can be transferred directly to Spanish with the help of a few simple patterns. No need to memorize hundreds of verbs when you can apply the pattern and figure out what a Latinate word in English is most likely to be in Spanish. Of course, you’ll get some wrong, but getting things wrong is how we learn.
An example
competition => competición
Now we can find the verb “compete:” competir
An additional little tidbit is that con in Spanish means “with,” and the Latin root is often converted to “com.” So, compete or competition probably comes from a phrase such as “with {something}.”. I can guess then that “pete” part might mean something like “strife” or “effort.”
And I’m pretty close.
https://www.etymonline.com/word/compete
So much fun.