The Telenovela Method, 2nd Edition - How to Learn Spanish Using TV, Movies, Books, Comics, And More

Introduction:

Why this method, where it came from,
and how to use this book
and the resources it contains

I love learning new languages. I love learning new languages because I love traveling and meeting people from other countries and learning about them and their culture, and you absolutely cannot do this, I mean really understand them and their culture, without being able to communicate in their native language. There is no getting around this. Languages are a tool to me, a means to an end, not an end in themselves.

Some people learn languages just because they love the act, the process, of learning languages: figuring out the grammar and syntax, learning all these interesting and obscure words and their etymology, learning all the little tidbits of cultural background and history behind certain words and phrases, etc. That’s fine and it’s a part of the process which I enjoy as well. There is nothing whatsoever wrong with it, it’s someone learning about something which interests and challenges them. However, it’s definitely not sufficient reason for me to spend the (not insignificant) time and energy required to learn a whole new language.

I am interested in learning a language only if I am planning on using it to talk to people who speak it, I learn it because it allows me to do so. I am interested in people. I want to be able to talk to, communicate with, and understand them. I want to be able to read their books, watch their movies, and listen to their music. I want to make friends with them, I want to socialize with them. I want to be able to understand them and their culture, I want to be able to participate in that culture. There is only one possible way to do this: learn their language. There is always something lost in translation, usually quite a bit, so that won’t do (translating to or communicating in English, that is).

I just wanted to make it clear the angle that I’m coming from on this, the goals that I have when I learn a language, and therefore the intended purpose of my method, this book, and the techniques taught herein: to learn Spanish so that you can use it, primarily to communicate with native speakers. That’s the point, the overriding objective. You could easily adapt most of the knowledge contained here for other various purposes, other reasons someone might want to learn a language. You could do this, sure, if you liked, so it’s certainly something potentially useful to someone who has an objective other than the one that I have. It’s just that this book is really tailored for people who want to learn to communicate, specifically to speak, with native speakers in Spanish in the same manner in which you and I talk with most people every day in our own native language.

Most people just want to learn to communicate—speak, listen, read, and write—normally like they do every day in their native tongue: that’s who this is for.

When I was twelve I started teaching myself French using an old Berlitz book from the ’50s and a Pimsleur French audio course I talked my parents into getting me for my birthday (this was so long ago they were cassette tapes, not CDs) and I loved it, I relished every little bit of progress I gained each day, every new word I learned, and when I finally figured out how to do that oddball French “R” that’s sort of a dry gurgling sound in the back of the throat I was like a kid that just opened a present on Christmas morning and discovered that it was exactly what they wanted. Then I got to high school where I had my first language classes ever, and they were in my beloved French. This was when I got a dose of the nasty, hard reality that are most language classes…

At the time, I really loved French, but memorizing dozens of conjugation charts and vocabulary lists, doing boring exercises for homework from an outdated textbook that taught the sort of French no native speaker would ever use in real life, and almost never, ever actually speaking any, you know, French very quickly put an end to that. I somehow plowed my way through four years of that and managed decent grades, but it really turned me off to language-learning for a while. After struggling to teach myself French and suffering through four years of terrible classes, I ended up under the impression that learning a language was very difficult, time consuming, and not much fun at all. Regrettably, this is what most people who have had language classes in school end up thinking, particularly if you’re from an English-speaking country where language classes are notoriously bad and very few native English speakers end up learning a second language.

In the meantime I messed around with German a little bit in anticipation of a school trip to Germany (it was a week long and included a couple of days in Switzerland and Austria, both German-speaking countries), as well as some French in my spare time, but the time-consuming schoolwork I had to deal with coupled with my negative experience with language classes meant that I didn’t do too much in that regard while in high school.

When I got to college I encountered a friend of a friend (only met him twice) who was in the process of learning Spanish because he worked in a restaurant with a bunch of native Spanish speakers, had always wanted to learn the language, and saw this as his opportunity.

The way he was doing it was by watching telenovelas, which is what soap operas are known as in Spanish (“novela” = “novel”, and “tele” is short for “televisión”, so “telenovela” = “television novel”, makes sense), and then learning Spanish from them by looking up every bit of Spanish they used (words, grammar, expressions, everything), either in a dictionary or, if that didn’t cut it, by asking his coworkers the next time he saw them. I met him once more about a year later and he was completely fluent. I asked him if he had gotten that way simply from watching Spanish TV and then looking up anything he didn’t understand: “yup, pretty much”. That impressed me at the time and stuck with me until a few years ago when I made the decision to learn Spanish. I decided to take his basic concept and play with it, the first big change I made being that I would use the internet as much as possible since I was aware of just how powerful a tool it was for learning pretty much anything. What evolved over a period of a couple of years of trial and error was what I call the “telenovela method”.

I want to make something clear: neither my acquaintance who originally inspired me nor I “invented” this concept of using popular foreign language media to learn that particular foreign language. There are records of language teachers dating back to at least the 1700s using this technique where they would have their students read, watch, or listen to music, books, and plays in the language they were learning and then do whatever was necessary in order to understand it, as well as, when possible, imitating the native speaker until they sounded just like them. This basic (and rather obvious) method has been around for a very long time, probably because it is so obvious. It’s just that now we have the internet as well as all the prior knowledge and experience of those language learners and teachers who have come before us, so now what I’m presenting to you is one of the most recent and refined versions of this particular method that takes advantage of all the recent advances in technology as well as all the knowledge we now have about how we learn languages.

Here’s why I like this method:

1. Most importantly: it’s fun, it doesn’t feel like work. I can’t possibly emphasize how important this is, even though it might seem like it’s not, even though it might seem like a trivial or silly requirement. ‘Fun’ will do more to actually make you succeed at learning a language than any other factor, bar none.

   Why? Because it keeps you interested, it keeps you paying attention, it keeps you coming back, it keeps you from giving up, it keeps you from getting bored (which inevitably leads to you giving up). Don’t overestimate your self-discipline, even the most determined and disciplined among us would be helped immensely by making the process fun and interesting versus not. At the very least, you’ll accomplish a lot more in a lot less time and with a lot less stress if it’s fun and you will therefore do it whenever you can (because, of course, you enjoy it), even when you don’t have to, which means that you learn more, faster.

   This is in contrast to when it’s not fun, when it’s just more work, and therefore you only do it when you absolutely have to and you don’t learn as much, it takes longer, and you’re much more likely to give up before really accomplishing much of anything, least of all your original goal, which for many of you is to become fluent in the language.

   Make it fun.

2. You learn Spanish as it’s currently used right now by native speakers, that is: you learn modern, contemporary Spanish, precisely the kind you want to learn if you want to be able to converse with native speakers and you want to sound just like they do. You learn to speak exactly as they do.

   You don’t learn anything outdated, obscure, or restricted only to more formal environments. You’re not taught to be...