Introduction:

Spanish is a Romance language that originated in the Iberian Peninsula of Europe. Today, it is a global language with nearly 500 million native speakers, mainly in Spain and the Americas. It is the world’s second-most spoken native language after Mandarin Chinese, and the world’s fourth-most spoken language overall after English, Mandarin Chinese, and Hindi.

Spanish is a part of the Ibero-Romance group of languages of the Indo-European language family, which evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin in Iberia after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The oldest Latin texts with traces of Spanish come from mid-northern Iberia in the 9th century, and the first systematic written use of the language happened in Toledo, a prominent city of the Kingdom of Castile, in the 13th century. Modern Spanish was then taken to the viceroyalties of the Spanish Empire beginning in 1492, most notably to the Americas, as well as territories in Africa and the Philippines.

After Latin, the language that has had the biggest influence on Spanish is Arabic. Today, the foreign language exerting the most influence is English, and Spanish has adopted hundreds of English words related to technology and culture.

Understanding a spoken foreign language is a whole other skill set from reading, speaking, and writing. You need to have a lot of exposure to the sounds of a language before the words sound familiar enough to recognize. So what you are encountering is perfectly normal!

When babies learn their maternal language, they do a lot of babbling to imitate the sounds that they hear. Babies in Spanish-speaking countries will develop a babble that sounds distinctly different from babies in the day, English-speaking countries. Slowly but surely, through a lot of imitation and reinforcement from caregivers, the baby develops language. They move into recognizable sounds, like ma-ma, da -da, ba-ba, etc. They then move into actual words, then sentences. So they can communicate through simple speech, but they lack the vocabulary and complex understanding of a language to have any kind of meaningful conversation until much later. These stages of development are the same for people acquiring another language. We must first go through this stage of just being able to differentiate the different sounds of a language, which are often very different from ours. Also, despite knowing the vocabulary, to hear a native speaker speaking Spanish is going to sound much different than a native English speaker speaking Spanish. The grammar and syntax (word order, for short), are somewhat different than in your native language, and that can throw you off.

I’ve taught Spanish and German, as well as English in schools in Spain, and one thing I found myself doing occasionally (out of desperation, because this isn’t good technique…) was pronouncing the words with the language learners accent/dialect just to give them a chance to hear all the sounds in a language. Also interesting to note: you must build up different muscles in your mouth and throat to speak a foreign language, and Spanish is no different. Speak it long enough, and your mouth will get tired until you build up strength those other muscles.

Another factor to consider, in English we have a glottal stop, so we can better hear the start and stop of different words, but much less so in romantic languages (especially in Spanish, which to the untrained ear sounds like one long flowing string of sounds)

However, when listening, you’re suddenly thrown into the deep end because you’re forced to understand and absorb the words and meanings of what’s being spoken at the speaker’s pace.

Further to that, the human brain is specifically attuned to process the world through visuals, which means your brain can process things coming from your eyes far more naturally and quickly than things that come through your other senses, so it makes sense that the visual aspect of a language (reading and writing) is far easier to master than the auditory aspect (listening and speaking).

My tips, force yourself to be fully immersed in the language – don’t even have English as an option to fall back on. An example of this would be to say watch Spanish language TV with Spanish subtitles. If you need to, pause the TV to process the subtitles, but this will teach your brain to match the Spanish words (which you are already comfortable with) and the sounds. Of course, nothing ever beats the full immersion that comes with finding someone who can speak the language and asking them to speak only Spanish to you.

One more tip: try not to worry about picking up every single word that’s being spoken, but try more to understand the overarching point that’s being made. Spanish is one of the world’s languages with low information density per word so Spanish speakers tend to speak quite fast, but it also means that it’s ok if not every single word is picked up and processed by you. You can also always ask the speaker to speak more slowly at a pace that you’re comfortable with. Pretty much every Spanish speaker I know (myself included!) are extremely friendly people and would be more than happy to find out you’re learning their language and to help you out!

Carry a dictionary around with you and try to translate every sign you see into Spanish! Also, try imitating the words you hear from native speakers. Just like babies learn

You’ll be understanding everything you hear in no time!