How I learnt Spanish My Journey to Fluency
hello everyone
welcome back to english with lucy i’ve
got a slightly different video for you
today it’s something i’ve had a lot of
questions about
recently and i’m going to talk to you
about how
i became fluent in a second language
so many of you will already know but i’m
sure
many of you don’t know i am fluent in
spanish
if you would like to hear me speak
spanish then you can click
up here and i filmed a video
speaking in spanish talking about the
different
funny mistakes that i made whilst i was
learning the language
now the reason i am telling you this
story in
english rather than in spanish is
because i think it will be a really good
opportunity for you guys to practice
your listening
and i also want you to feel more
motivated with your
language learning journey now i will
warn you
i was very lucky in my situation so
i don’t want you to think oh god lucy’s
fluent because
she had this this and this and she’s so
lucky and the situation was perfect
no i want to just show you and inspire
you and and kind of demonstrate that you
can
get to a really good level of fluency in
a language that is not
your mother tongue ah and i have one
thing to say before we get started
you can sign up for a free audio book
and 30 day free trial on
audible.com the link is in the
description box
videos like these are subtitled and will
be really really helpful for you if you
want to improve your listening and
understanding and pronunciation in
english
but if you want to take it a step
further try an audio book it’s something
that can be
really really helpful and i’ve had
fabulous feedback from all the
lucifers that have tried it already so
here it is my journey to fluency in
spanish now please note that
fluency to me does not mean 100 accuracy
fluency to me means that you can speak
without thinking
it is almost as easy as your native
tongue um
i dream in spanish i have had
relationships in spanish i can make
jokes in spanish
so really i consider myself to be fluent
you might not agree with that i do know
that there are some issues with my
pronunciation
like i can do it but sometimes don’t put
it into the words so sometimes i confuse
my
beard with my beard so please bear with
me
right so let’s start the journey as it
were
i grew up in a really really small
village in
the county of bedfordshire in england
and languages were never
a big thing at my school so typically
english children will have to study
french at school
from the age of 10 and then i think you
are allowed to give it up
at the age of 14 or 13 14.
so really you only have to do three
years of language this is in state
school not private school it’s different
um i started off in a state school and
then i went to a private school for four
years and then i went back to state
and i had been studying french and i
hated it i loved the french language but
i found it really really hard to learn i
was in a class of
40 children and french kind of had the
reputation of being like
the most boring class ever so i kind of
went along with that and then when i
moved to my next
school suddenly they told me i had to
learn
two languages so i would continue with
french and then i could choose
spanish or german i’d asked everyone and
i asked which one’s the easiest and they
told me
spanish was so i joined this class it
was about 25
girls because it was a girls school i
was at the very bottom
of the bottom class because they’d had a
couple of years
you know spanish experience and i had
never i’d never even been to spain at
this point
so i sat there in all of the classes
really bored
really unenthusiastic i didn’t want to
learn spanish i couldn’t
wait to give it up i could not wait to
stop spanish and i knew
that at the age of 16 i would be able to
i went to every class i sat there
was like hola
gato perro pero
[Music]
and um and yeah to my
surprise i suddenly found myself
understanding
things and whilst some of the other
students were struggling
with the grammar it really made sense to
me
but i didn’t want it to make sense so i
sat there bored
but then i couldn’t stop thinking
outside of spanish class
cool that present tense really it makes
sense
oh i’m a poet and i didn’t even realize
it
anyway um so i decided well
maybe i could get quite a good grade in
the end of your exam
if i actually study something so i
started
really putting the work in and then i
found the class to be a bit slow so i
asked to be moved up to the top level
and they let me
and in the end i got the highest grade
possible in in my exam
age 16. but i really put the work in and
i remember i
always used to have a bath every night
well i still do but
i remember very very clearly having a
bath and just speaking to myself in
spanish in the bath
and i would love to hear what i was
saying back then
but then i decided to carry it on to a
level and
a level is the last two years of school
of high school
and you have to get your a levels to
then go to university
i did three a levels i did biology
chemistry
and spanish so from then on
i decided that i loved spanish
and i didn’t just love spanish i also
decided that
spanish men were incredibly good looking
and sexy sexy
really they were really attractive so i
started
i started putting in a lot of effort i
was really lucky at my
at my high school i moved to a state
school and i was really lucky because
nobody wanted to study languages so i
think there were 200 people
in my year one person studied german
two people studied french and three
people studied spanish
no one did but it was great for me
because i had a really really small
class
with an amazing teacher she was called
miss flores and she was irish even
though her surname was flores
and just she was so inspirational and
pushed me hard in a good way
and so after one year of studying
spanish i then decided
i want to take this to the next level so
after one more year of studying spanish
i mean i wouldn’t have been at even a b1
level it was very
very little the amount we were doing but
i decided
i want to take this to the next level i
was working at a pub and i
was saving up all my money and i managed
to buy
flights and a spanish course in
seville now i don’t really know why i
picked seville i think it’s because my
first spanish teacher had said that she
was
she’d been to seville and it was nice so
i thought oh i’d go i’ll go to seville
then i had no idea that seville
has a very thick andalucian accent
so i got there with my you know standard
schoolgirl spanish
and i didn’t understand a bloody word
but anyway i did a week at a
school called click international it’s
in the international house chain of
schools it was really really good if you
want to do an
intensive spanish course i would
definitely do it there
and and i stayed with a host family
and i met lots of spanish people
and eventually i met a couple of spanish
guys
that i then became friends with so it
was a bit crazy
i was 17 running around seville um
going on mopeds and staying out far too
late
making it to class because i wanted to
learn my spanish so i went first time in
august which was very very hot
i saved up all my money again after the
trip in august and i went in october
for another week and then i went again
in april so i was still 17 at this point
and a guy that i have been friends with
for a while
i met him again out there and
basically we fell in love we fell pretty
hard in love actually we were together
for four years
i won’t say his name because i’d like to
respect his privacy
but um but yes i felt very much in love
with the spanish man
and luckily this man didn’t speak such
good english
so our whole relationship was in spanish
and we used to what
sap together all day long i would go out
there and see him as often as i could
i became so close with his family and we
ended up
living together in london we lived
together in seville
we lived together in london again and
and that really was a driving force in
my
journey to fluency and i would say after
about a year of being with him
i felt completely fluent i felt
that spanish was just my natural
language because we were living together
i would go to work and speak in english
but my home life was always in spanish
so that was a really big motivation but
you might be thinking
great lucy so happy for you that you
managed to find a spanish boyfriend but
how can i apply this to my language
learning
well i’ve got some tips for you the
first tip is
copying mouth movements so when my
ex-boyfriend would speak
i would always watch his mouth and the
shapes that it made
and i started to realize that the sounds
and the shapes were different so in
english we would say the letter d
but in spanish they would say the so it
would be like a flatter
a flatter shape and i noticed this
watching him
because he’s from the south of spain he
would say instead of
estoy he would say
instead of saying things like he would
say
so i started really really copying the
sounds he made
rather than just the words another thing
i experienced was complete
immersion so i was thrown into spain
at the deep end i mean i had to
communicate because he was someone i
wanted to communicate with so when
you’re looking to learn a foreign
language
really make sure that the motivation’s
there you know i want to pass my exam
so that i can never study english again
is not going to make you fluent
you really have to think why do i want
to learn this language
and then work towards that mine was
i want to be able to communicate
fluently and comfortably and express
myself to my boyfriend
so that was my motivation and oh my god
i worked hard towards that goal now
another thing which
you guys can also do is never let
anything slip and when i say never let
anything slip it means
don’t think oh god i don’t know that
word tomorrow i’ll search it because you
won’t
i’ve got a video about learning
vocabulary which you can see
right here but basically every time i
heard my ex-boyfriend
say a phrase or an expression that i
didn’t understand i would stop him
and ask him to explain it to me and if
he couldn’t i would write it down and i
would search it later and i was
meticulous with that you aren’t just
going to
pick up all of the words and phrases
because some of them are idiomatic they
don’t make sense
i remember having a really hard time
with the word
bayer like
and i was like what does that mean and i
remember that he couldn’t explain it to
me and i just
went on a quest on a on a road to
discovery i needed to find out what
buyer meant and when i should use it
and i did in the end so yeah you go me
another thing i did was i wasn’t afraid
to ask people
to repeat things and i actually found
that people were really kind to me and
when i asked them to repeat things or i
didn’t understand a joke
they would slow down and explain it to
me and if they were rude about it
i didn’t want them in my life anyway so
another thing i did was i always watched
spanish youtubers i loved hola soy
herman
and i also loved out on play i just find
him so funny
he does like prank videos and he just
basically makes fun of people and he is
very very funny
and i also loved el rubios who is a
gamer i just would have them all in the
background and always listening to their
chitta chatter
i also watched the spanish news every
single morning that really helped me as
well
and i read harry potter in spanish
because i love the harry potter books in
english
so it was really interesting to read it
in spanish
and that’s just something that you have
to remember you need to be
interested you need to have a motivation
so for me
reading a book about economics and
spanish
would not motivate me at all to learn
the language and i probably wouldn’t
finish it
probably wouldn’t start it actually yeah
so choose things that are really
relevant to you
if you like photography but you also
want to learn a language
find somebody doing photography
tutorials
in english and there we have it you’ve
made your own lesson for yourself
now i want to talk to you about a couple
of things that i love and i
wouldn’t have without speaking a second
language fluently
and the first one is i have two
personalities
honestly everybody says it in english
i’m quite i
i’m not really i’m not really very
vulgar
around in english i’m more professional
and i think i’m more
more uh i’m slightly more polite
especially the way i speak
but in spanish because i kind of
learned my spanish from somebody who
said swear words
and used you know lots of slang phrases
and had a thick accent
well it kind of developed my spanish
personality as well
so i mean it’s not forced at all it’s
just the way i naturally am but it’s
great to have you know kind of
two sides to me as well the second thing
is two sets of humors and this is great
because
english jokes do not translate into
spanish and spanish jokes do not
translate into english
so in english i make people laugh using
puns
and play on words and things like that
and in spanish i have to think of other
things so
we in spanish we tell more anecdotes we
like
people to make people laugh about our
experiences and things like that that’s
just my interpretation
but it’s great to have different funny
stories that i can tell to different
groups of people
that just don’t translate also being
fluent in a second language has
really opened up my mind um
it’s made me much more confident
nowadays if i hear somebody speaking on
a train
in spanish i’ll immediately go up to
them and say ah pedophilia
than me it is and i’ll ask them oh my
god where are you from and
that’s something i would not do you know
otherwise and just
the final thing is that i really really
enjoy
speaking spanish and if you can get to a
level where you
enjoy speaking that language everything
is just going to fly
you are going to have so much fun so yes
guys
this was quite a long video i hope that
it’s motivated you and inspired you
a little bit yes i had a boyfriend who
spoke the language that i was wanting to
learn
but you don’t have to do that it might
not be possible and you
certainly shouldn’t look for one just to
learn english
i was very lucky but take little bits of
information from my story
and apply it to your own story which
might be starting it might have already
started you might be close to finishing
and just do the best that you can do
with your situation and your time
that’s it for today’s video don’t forget
to sign up for your audiobook at
audible.com the link is in the
description
and don’t forget to connect with me on
all of my social media
i’ve got my instagram and my facebook
and i will see you soon
for another lesson
[Music]
[Music]
you