How I Taught Myself Spanish in About 8 Weeks

More about the tools and techniques I used

My name is Noah Benjamin and I taught myself how to speak conversational Spanish in about two months. This page was originally made to help out some of my friends who asked me how I learned Spanish, but then it ended up on Google, so now it’s available for everyone to see. Hopefully even more people will get some use out of this.

I’m going to say something right now that’ll probably bother a lot of people, but I promise I’ll make up for it right afterward. What I need to say is this: learning a new language is easy.

Most people seem to believe the exact opposite of this, that learning a new language takes years and tons of effort. This isn’t true at all. I said I would make up for what I said, so what I’m going to do now is spell out for you exactly how to teach yourself Spanish in the next 8 weeks. This is the exact plan that I followed, and it’ll prove to you that learning a new language really is easy — as long as you’re following the right plan.

Before I get into this, I want to warn you: I ended up spending about $110 to learn Spanish using this method. Although it’s dirt cheap, I’m not going to be laying out a “free” plan for teaching yourself Spanish. They just flat-out don’t work. If you really want to learn Spanish, you’re going to have to spend a tiny bit of cash. I do provide some free resources on this page though, and I recommend taking advantage of them before spending cash if you’re nervous about that.

And on to my plan to teach yourself Spanish in about two months…

When you speak in your native language every day, there really isn’t very much variety in your speech. In fact, research shows that about 80% of what’s said in any particular language comes from less than 1,500 common words. The same thing goes for day-to-day speech — when you’re in a store, in a restaurant, or really anywhere, you’re generally saying the same things over and over again. For the majority of the things you do, you only use a very limited set of vocabulary.

So really the “secret” to quickly learning a new language is to study the most common words and learn how to speak in real daily situations. This is where most language learning programs fail — they don’t simulate real situations, but instead just throw random words and sentences at you. This is probably why I came out of years of high school French classes unable to speak even a single coherent sentence.

I mean, if you find yourself in a foreign country, does it really benefit you to know the names of different farm animals if you can’t even order a drink in a restaurant?

So along with learning proper pronunciation and grammar, my top priority was learning common words and phrases. You know, stuff I could actually use right away. And, through a lot of research, I found that the best way to learn all this was to use a good audio course, where I was listening to a native speaker and simulating a real conversation.

Finding the right course

I finally settled on a course called Rocket Spanish. I chose it because it met just about every criteria I was looking for:

It is built around audio lessons, which I usually listened to while driving around in my car
It focuses on teaching real conversation with common words primarily
It has hundreds of pages of supplementary study guides that complement the audio lessons and teach grammar rules and extra vocabulary

It also had a bunch of extras, like a suite of software called MegaSpanish that has games to help with vocab and grammar, but I never really used these since I didn’t feel like they were a good use of my time.

And, luckily, it ended up being the cheapest of all the Spanish packages I was looking at, and has a 60 day, no-questions-asked money back guarantee. Since I didn’t have anything to lose, I gave it a shot.

I ended up making a video review of Rocket Spanish since real, in-depth reviews of the program seemed scarce online. It runs about 22 minutes in length — I go into pretty specific detail — so click here to check it out if you want to know more about the program.

And for more information and to purchase Rocket Spanish, click here to go to their web site.

Supplementary guides

Rocket Spanish ended up being my primary Spanish guide. I’m surprised more people don’t know about it.

The only other supplement I used in those beginning 8 weeks was a book called 501 Spanish Verbs. I got it cheap at my local book store and it had, as the name advertises, 501 fully conjugated verbs and common verbs that I studied and memorized. The book also contained an extra 2100 unconjugated verbs that I could work with. This expanded my vocabulary significantly.

Again, you can be conversational in Spanish within about 8 weeks if you follow my guides here: focus on conversational phrases and the most common words, along with grammar and pronunciation exercises, and you’ll be speaking with natives in no time.

Good luck, and if you have any questions at all, please e-mail me at noah@teachyourselfspanish.net. I really do love helping out with this stuff!

To your continued learning,

Noah Benjamin