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 impressed me deeply in my teaching
career. It's this, "The life of the
tree is in the root, not the fruit." Now, you say, "yeah, and so
what?" So a lot!
Most people "pick fruit" when
they try to learn Spanish, they don't develop the root system properly. Let me
explain...
Ask yourself a question. Where is the life of a tree? If you pick the fruit off a tree, does the tree die? No. What
happens if you cut the tree's root system out of the ground? You're absolutely
correct, the tree will die. Why? Because "the life of the tree is in the
root, not the fruit."
What is the fruit that you want to produce as it relates to learning Spanish?
What's your ultimate goal? Go ahead and write it down somewhere, keep it on
record. For most people it will be something like "converse well" or
"communicate well." (By the way, I suggest that you make your goal
more specific than "converse well."
Perhaps something like…"I want to be 90% proficient of a native
speaker with the ability to counsel my clients correctly in the area of
immigration law." That is
objective and measureable.)
Most people go wrong because 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 or watching television in Spanish.
Amigo,
if you try to develop fruit from the fruit, you will pick a peck of "muchos
problemas!"
The real question here is not, "How do you produce the fruit?" The
real question is, "What's in the root system?"
Once you know that, you can focus on the right things.
There are two essential components in
this root system. If you master, and I do mean master, these two components you
will become bilingual, if you don't, you won't. It's that simple.
The first component is words.
That's right, you need to learn enough words, not only enough words, the right
words. So, you need to learn "enough of the right words."
The best way to get good answers is to ask good questions, so let's begin to ask
and answer some good questions about words.
Question: How many words does the
average native speaker know in his native language?
Answer: Around 10,000 to 15,000.
Question: How many words does the
average person use in his normal speech patterns?
Answer: Around a tenth of his
vocabulary. In other words, around
1000 to 1500.
