How To Really Learn Spanish - by Ricardo González, Founder & Executive Director of Bilingual America  

Table of Contents
Forward - Dr. Jane Madsen Introduction
Chapter 1 - The Importance of Methods
Chapter 2 - Assess Your Abilities
Chapter 3 - The Fruit and the Root
Chapter 4 - The Power of Patterns
Chapter 5 - You're Not A Native...All About Immersion
Chapter 6 - The Four Secrets To Long Term Retention
Chapter 7 - The Cozy Comfortable Classroom
Chapter 8 - Eight Reasons Why Telephone Tutoring is Better Than Face to Face Tutoring
Chapter 9 - What To Expect From a Great Tutor
Chapter 10 - What To Expect From Great Course Materials
Chapter 11 - Mastering Pronunciation, Speech Flow and Comprehension
Chapter 12 - Put Your Products on the Shelf!
Chapter 13 - What to Do When You Already Speak Some Spanish
Chapter 14 - Cultural Training and Language
Closing Thoughts


Chapter 4 - The Power of Patterns

Picture this...

Mrs. Campos, (fictitious Spanish teacher), stands up and says, "Today, we're going to learn the Imperfect Past Tense." Your eyes widen, your mouth quivers, your knees buckle and your heart sinks. Why? Because the very thought of all this "grammar stuff" runs against your very nature.

Think about it, how many of us today opened our mouths to speak and after uttering some words of great significance, thought, "Wow, I sure am impressive, I just used a "Periphrastic Future." or.. "That was cool, I just created a Past Unreal Condition with a special touch of the Subjunctive Mood."

Let's face it, the only thing this will do for you as a learner is confuse you. Maybe you have already experienced this and you know exactly what I am talking about.

Forget about "tenses" and "conjugations!"

Language is not about tense, it is about time! It is all about the expression of time. This is where the "The Power of Patterns" comes in.

Every sentence is made using a group of words, and placing those words into what I call a "pattern." There are 15 different principle patterns in both Spanish and English. In other words, there are primarily 15 different ways to use the same words, thus allowing you to express 15 different elements of time.

In fact, you can create equivalents and line these patterns up side by side in English and Spanish. It is kind of an "x = y" scenario. That, by the way, is a very, very helpful thing to do for new learners or people who have not mastered structure yet. You just have to know how they exactly match up.

Here is how patterns work...

Take the words "to walk," "to," and "the restaurant." Now, I can use these same words to express 15 different things. I can say, "I walk to the restaurant," "I am walking to the restaurant," "I am going to walk to the restaurant," "I have been walking to the restaurant," "I was walking to the restaurant," "I was going to walk to the restaurant," and so on. In other words there are 15 different ways to express time.

Here's an interesting observation. In both English and Spanish, there are primarily three ways to talk about things in the future, two ways to talk about things in the present and 10 ways to talk about the past. Language tends to be evolutionary. Because people tend to talk so much about their past, we have invented many different ways to talk about our past.

Let's go back to the concept of putting words in patterns. When you can take words and put them into any of the 15 principle patterns, you can make sentences…lots of them!

When you can make sentences, you can string some together and make paragraphs. If you know how to pronounce the words in patterns, you can make “verbal paragraphs,” which means you can make conversations with people. And, of course, when you are listening to native people speak, they are only doing the same thing; putting words into patterns.

This is very powerful so please pay close attention here:

Let's say that you have 2000 words you can interchange in any way you want into 15 different patterns.

How many sentences could you make?

Take 2000 to the POWER of 15. This is 2000 times 2000 times 2000 times, etc. This is BILLIONS of sentences, amigo. Learn to use the power of combination. Learn to use words in patterns.

Think about the color wheel.

The three primary colors of red, blue and yellow, when combined in different ways, allow us to enjoy thousands and thousands of different colors. That is the power of combination. The power of combination is absolutely incredible and if you master 2000 words and 15 patterns you will be painting some very impressive scenes in your Spanish communications! The idea is that you learn to "paint" for yourself, not simply make a copy or do some sort of "dot to dot" type of communication.

Being able to put sentences easily together for yourself sure beats struggling in conversations, or worse yet, being limited to "parroting" memorized dialogues as are in a lot of books and classes. Talking about "María and Lupe getting a taxi in Guadalajara" will not cut it in real life!

Let's pretend you just bought a brand new house with a walk-in closet in your bedroom. It is just an empty room with nothing in it. Will you just move in and throw your clothes on the floor or will you consider a "hanging system" first so that you can hang them in an orderly fashion? “Obvio,” that is Spanish for "obvious." That is all we are doing. Before you learn a bunch of words and have no place to put them, you need to have a place to put them — a "hanging system." This only makes good, logical sense.

About four years ago I developed a system called "The Real Spanish Path" which allows the average person to learn 12 of the 15 patterns within an average of 10 hours. We have our students do this before they learn any vocabulary. It is an incredible process. In around ten hours of study the average student masters about 70 percent of the entire structure of the Spanish language!