When I was a kid, I lived in the mountains of Puerto Rico. It was great! My father has 27 brothers and sisters (not a misprint!), so you can imagine how many cousins I had roaming around the countryside. One of my favorite things to do was to go and pick fresh oranges right off the tree behind my grandparent's house. My grandparents had lots of orange trees and the fruit was always sweet, like my "abuela" (grandmother).

I learned something when I was young that has had a profound impact on my teaching career, something a lot of language teachers do not seem to recognize. It's this, "The life of the tree is in the root, not the fruit."

Most people "pick fruit" when they attempt to learn Spanish. They do not develop the root system properly.

Let me explain...

Ask yourself a question. “Where is the life of a tree?” I know I already told you, but I want you to think about it for just a moment. If you pick the fruit off a tree, does the tree die? No. What happens if you sever the tree's root system? You are absolutely correct, the tree will die! Why? Because "the life of the tree is in the root, not the fruit."

What is the fruit you want to produce as it relates to learning Spanish? What is your ultimate goal? For most people it will be something like "converse well" or "communicate well."

Here, precisely, is where most people go wrong, they focus on the fruit, not the root! They start learning in methodologies that emphasize the fruit; dialogues of Pablo and María eating in a restaurant, Gabriel and Andrea getting a taxi at the airport, listening to the radio in Spanish, watching Spanish television, or worse yet, they spend a lot of money and time to travel to a Latin American country for a very "fruity" total immersion course! Amigo, if you try to develop fruit from the fruit, you will be in a peck of "muchos problemas!"

The real question is not, "How do you produce the fruit?"
The real question is, "What is in the root system?"

There are two essential components in a language root system. If you master, and I do mean master, these two components you will become bilingual. If you do not, you will not. It is pretty much that simple.

The first component is words. That is right, you need to learn enough words, not only enough words but the right words. You need to learn "enough" of the right words.

The best way to get good answers is to ask good questions. Let us begin to ask and answer some good questions about words.

Question: How many words do average native speakers know in their native language?
Answer: Around 10,000 to 15,000.

Question: How many words do the average person use in normal speech patterns?
Answer: Around a tenth of known vocabulary or around 1000 to 1500.

Question: How many words do you need to learn in order to communicate well?
Answer: 1000 to 1500. I always advise building a vocabulary of at least 1500 to 2000 words. This is because even though you can control the words you use, you cannot control the other person. Because of this, you need to learn more words to understand well than you need to speak well.

Question: How do you learn and retain 2000 words in a reasonable period of time?
Answer: We’ll tell you in the the chapter titled, "The Four Secrets to Long-Term Retention...How to Remember Everything You Study."

Question: What kind of words should you learn?
Answer: People speak about 75 percent of the time in five general areas of life.

They are:

• Family
• Business
• Personal care
• Travel/transportation
• Food/dining

If you want to learn to communicate well, you should learn about 300 to 400 words in each of these five areas. What good would it do you to learn 1500 words in "hydro-technology" or any other field for that matter?

Let's say you are a doctor. If you learn 1500 words of medical terminology you would not be able to communicate well, not even with your patients, because your patients will talk most of the time in the above five areas. What I am saying is you need to be balanced in your vocabulary unless you are just looking to "get by" in your vocational area.

If you want to learn words that specifically apply to your vocation, what I call "specific speech flow," you will be very interested in our "Spanish Specialized" series.

Let's get back to our question and answer session!

Question: What do you do with words?
Answer: You put them into patterns.

Question: What is a pattern?
Answer: In the next chapter titled, "The Power of Patterns," you will find out how learning "Patterns" will revolutionize your approach to learning a language.

Now we have the first element of our root system — words. We know about how many you should learn and what kinds of words you need to know.

One last note, when you are learning words make sure you learn in a proper balance; about 60% nouns, 30% verbs and 10% adjectives and prepositions. That is the balance of speech and learning which will allow you to speak well when you are finished with a training program.

Now, since we need someplace to put all of those words, let's move to the "Power of Patterns."