A Practical Guide To Spanish: Practical Language

By Zakary Kerr

Spanish simplified! If you've tried learning Spanish before or if you're a total beginner, this book is for you. In my own experience, I've found many of the answers to my questions needlessly complex or simply lacking. I wrote this for you to be just what you need for a strong start in this rich and beautiful language. This concise guide comes with explanations and exercises for all you need to reach conversational fluency and explorative literacy in Spanish!

 

This book was written for you if you're sick of these things:

• Being sold courses
• Being sold additional study material when so much is already free
• Not enough material at the earliest stages of learning
• Overly complex grammarian answers
• Overly broad or simple answers
• Scouring the web, forums, and social media, for just the right explanation
• A lack of recommendations for further material

I understand and sympathize with how difficult it can be to get started in a new language. I've also met enough people with the same questions and frustrations and perhaps you're in a similar spot. Break common misconceptions around learning, go through the basic parts of speech and grammar structures, learn how to immerse with recommendations for material, and round it off with a few graded reading exercises and more written just for you in this brief guide to the big, wide world of Spanish!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Little House Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798223186106

Zakary Kerr

My name is Zakary Kerr and my passion for language comes from family roots and for teaching from my military service. I've learned Spanish, German, French, Italian, and Mandarin Chinese for fun, for work, or for both and I've had many frustrations and setbacks along the way. Friends, family, colleagues, and fellow students online have asked my advice which prompted me to put it all in one place! I sought to have a comprehensive, yet concise guide here for you. Be on the lookout for other reading material in the future for this language!

Book preview

Hello!

First, I would like to sincerely thank you for taking the time to read this book. I hope that I can provide some quality insight and help you move along your language journey with ease.

My name is Zakary Kerr and for over a decade and I have learned and used multiple languages making opportunities for myself finding native speakers online, going to foreign countries, and making friends in their language. I started with German in high school, but my interest in German actually came from a Christmas gift I got in middle school. I got Call of Duty 2 and heard the German spoken as I played and that sparked my curiosity.

My German heritage pushed me to take it seriously. I’m told some of our family fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, only to join the U.S. Army and return to Germany on our side. I’ve thought about how it must have felt for them having to abandon their country, their culture, and their language to swear allegiance to a foreign land. All for good reason, don’t get me wrong, but I imagine that on some level they felt robbed of their way of life.

I also considered early that not everyone that speaks a certain language is inherently a bad person. This might seem like a simple concept but consider the gut reaction of a New Yorker hearing Arabic in 2002 or parts of the world subject to Russian or Chinese aggression. The language alone may invoke some anger or fear, perhaps unfairly, but it is a real human reaction.

Since then, I have shaken a number of assumptions and made many great connections with people I am happy to call friends. I’ve built up something of a résumé along the way as well. My first German class was in Fall 2009, but my German didn’t really take off until I began teaching myself in 2013. I’ve dabbled in several languages as well, most in Arabic starting in 2016. I didn’t take another language seriously until 2018 when I picked up French and Italian. I got both languages to conversational fluencies in a matter of months in preparation for a deployment where I would use both languages often.

I used French in working with Moroccan military, locals, and customs officials. I used Italian with locals sourcing training materials and ordering the occasional espresso for me and my coworkers.

Most recently, I took Mandarin Chinese quite seriously, approaching HSK1 fluency in under 8 weeks. Now, I quite enjoy reading Mandarin. I will cover certifications much later, but here I will clarify that HSK1 is the most basic level of the formal Chinese Proficiency Test that has recently undergone drastic changes.

Given a couple of weeks, I’m confident that I could come back to my Italian fluency, even though I don’t claim to speak that language anymore. I also took a hiatus on Arabic, as I found the availability of reliable and clear resources to be frustratingly limited. I love maintaining my German and French by reading historic texts of the nations; keeping up with foreign news sources; and playing games, listening to music, or watching videos.

To summarize my credentials, I am a native English speaker with self-professed language skills, maintaining German and French who is also learning Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.

What This Is

As a sort of preface to the material of this book, it is important that I explain what this book really is and what it simply is not. But before I even get into that, I want you to know that if you believe you found you said something erroneous or otherwise disagreeable, please let me know directly with an email to [e-mail] .

Now, this book was made to be a practical guide to conversational fluency and exploratory literacy. In writing this book, I put a lot of effort into exploring my own methodology of how I learned multiple languages. I’ve considered what grammatical topics you will need to get you to a place of true comprehension and fluid use of daily speech. Once that happens, you can successfully expand into more advanced topics if you so desire.

If your end goal is to seek employment in a foreign country, to pursue a higher education there, or to immigrate to another country, this book should clarify a great many things that you need to better assimilate. This book is not meant to be a university education in fifty pages. What I hope to do with this book is to enable you to branch out with ease into more advanced topics and spark an interest in you to explore more about linguistics and the target language of your choice.

That said, I made sure to include the areas necessary to provide you a more intimate, yet still broad, understanding of your native language. These are the things that will enable you to ask better questions as you learn and make the foreign concepts less foreign. From my experience, I use these to generally compare or directly relate to other languages successfully and to broaden my understanding of those languages and cultures with ease. It will allow you to make deeper connections faster and to achieve your goals in a more enjoyable manner so that you feel more accomplished, educated, and truly capable with your abilities.

CHAPTER TWO

Breaking Misconceptions

Types of Fluency

What is fluency? Is it when