The Best New Year's Resolution
The New Year is approaching quickly. And at the New Year it's very common for everyone to make some New Year Resolutions. These are things to improve our lives like losing extra weight, quitting smoking, eating healthier, and getting more exercise. Another great New Year's resolution that will greatly improve your life is the resolution to learn the Spanish language.
Here are some suggestions designed to help you use this New Year to your advantage as you learn Spanish.
1 - New Year = New Words -- Learn 25 new words per month. Or 50 new Spanish words per month. Or even 100 new words per month. -- You can pick the number of words per month that's appropriate for your situation. The important part is to pick a number of words to learn per month and then stick to the plan -- no matter what happens keep learning those new words every month all year long. If you pick 100 new words per month you'll end the year with over 1000 new Spanish vocabulary words. That's awesome!
2 - Focus intensly on study of one of the Spanish parts of speech for an entire month. And each month switch to studying a new part of speech. If you do this, at the end of the year you'll be a Spanish grammar expert.
Begin in January by studying nouns. Nouns are everywhere making them a good place to start. Then when February comes work on verbs. Verbs are the action words that get things done. In March add Adjectives to your study routine.
And notice the word intensely up above -- really focus hard week after week on your chosen part of speech to master it. Really take the time to drill down on one of the Spanish parts of speech and learn a lot of words in the category of the month -- Then learn how that particular part of speech relates to the other words in the sentence. Learn the sentence structure issues related to the part of speech you're working on.
If you follow this plan, at the end of the year you will have mastered Spanish grammar and sentence structure. And of course, if you do this plan you are free to supplement your learning with other subjects besides parts of speech. You can and should do vocabulary building and anything else at the same time. Just keep in mind, as the weeks go by, that at the beginning of the year you made a commitment to focus deeply on one of the parts of speech every month. You'll be glad you did!
3 - Here's a New Year's Resolution for intermediate and advanced Spanish students. Select a Spanish novel at the bookstore or library and read every word of every page of the book during the year. And when you get to a word in the book you don't know force yourself to stop and look up the word and add it to your current vocabulary word list.
Depending on the size of the book and your Spanish skill level this can be a daunting task. There are a couple of keys to making this work: Be sure to pick a book that's commensurate with your skill level. You want to get a lot out of this exercise but you don't want to overload yourself. Secondly, divide the book up into 12 parts and work on one of those parts every month of the year. In other words, if the book you choose has 24 chapters, commit to reading 2 chapters per month, for every month in the year.
Caution!
As most of you are well aware, statistically a lot of New Year's resolutions end and fail around the third week of January. The key to avoiding this is to not set up some impossible-to-maintain pace and super-large goal. -- Just design something realistic you will follow through with. Good luck and best wishes as you plan your goal for the New Year!