If I may throw in my two Euros worth:
I treat Spanish the way I do German. I go there among native speakers and just throw myself in. I make a true idiot of myself with "wilt thou the peppercorns pass onward" and "which way to the librarian's sheep fold?" But I have a thick skin, and Germans have a passion for correcting others, and Spanish speakers just have a good sense of humor. I live and learn. (Maybe I am partially responsible for Americans' awful reputation abroad!)

The best advice is the Nike logo: Just do it. don't be afraid to laugh along. Life is long and rich, and you are truly LIVING when you're messing about in other cultures and taking risks. And people of character are giving and forgiving, especially after a couple of cervezas or finos!

Rebekah the Fool.

Amen to that! I had a horrible time getting most of my students to SPEAK Spanish! In their case, a lot of their reticence was due to adolescent fear of ridicule---not from me, but from their peers! I just loved to pieces those kids who would try to use it,errors and all, and actually communicate! Do babies speak their native tongue flawlessly? NO!! But by speaking and being corrected, they eventually get it right! When they say, "I goed potty by myself" we know exactly what they mean, and the error reflects perceived grammar.

So you just keep on going to the librarian's sheep fold---a darn good place for a language learner!

Pardon my ignorance, but when you guys say talking with or without verbs, do you mean speaking with things like

should have
would have
could have
would have
had
have
will be
would be
will have

etc... ???

Cuz i barely knew spanish before, and i learned fluent spanish through a translator online, and from there i learned more by reading every book i read in english in spanish. That really helped.

But learning how to change the tense of a word in spanish was the most dificult part because there is no actual word for "will" or "would" in spanish, the word just changes in it's tense.

Shiloh, don't feel bad about the spelling of c'est la vie. There is an ancient joke about two guys, a Frenchman and a Spaniard, watching a girl skating. She falls, accidentally assuming an immodest position. The Frenchman yawns and says, "C'est la vie." The Spaniard, indignant, says, "Yo tambien se la vi pero no dije nada."

quote:

Ahh, but you must remember that people learning English have it much, much worse. It's difficult in Spanish to learn which tense to use when and how. But at least once you have that, it pretty much follows a standard pattern. We have irregular verbs everywhere in English.

English is difficult in many ways, but the verb conjugations in the past tense are quite easy for foreigners I believe. For example I walked, you walked, they walked. Yes there are irregular verbs (just like other languages) but again we have I put, you put, they put OR I drank, you drank, they drank. The only exception I can think of (I'm sure there must be a second) is I was, you were, they were.
Verb endings are definitely more difficult to learn in Spanish (or French or German etc)

quote:

originally posted by Pr0x1mo:
[qb]But learning how to change the tense of a word in spanish was the most dificult part because there is no actual word for "will" or "would" in spanish, the word just changes in it's tense. [/qb]

For me it was exactly that feature that made Spanish quite easy for me to learn. The conjugations are extremely regular (even the "irregular" ones are pretty regular), and because there are no auxiliary ("helper") words, you don't have to worry about questions of word order and the like. Questions like, "Which helper word do I use?", "Does it go before or after the main verb?", "Where do I place my adverbs? Before, after or in between the helper and the main verb?", and "Do I conjugate the helper word and leave the main verb in the infinitive, or the other way around?" etc simply don't come up at all.

It's features of Spanish like this (along with the simple rules for pronunciation and spelling) that have convinced me that Spanish is much, much easier to learn for an English-speaker than learning English is for a Spanish-speaker.

Learning the verb conjugations is extremely intimidating at first for an English speaker because there are so many tenses and so many verbs, but the regularity and patterns are so extensive in the language (like I said, even in "irregular" verbs) that it's not so hard to learn as it might seem.

Learning about 14 tenses might sound pretty hard but it's really not that bad. The only trick is making sure you know *when* to use all those lovely tenses!

Disclaimer: my Spanish sucks, but I still consider it to be an "easy" language.