Timothy Moser - Accelerated Spanish Vol. 1

Accelerated Spanish

Learn fluent Spanish with a proven accelerated learning system.

CREATED BY TIMOTHY MOSER
with Josiah Moser and Samuel Moser

Visit SpanishIn1Month.com for free, unrestricted access all the materials you need to attain mastery of Spanish.

Volume 2

LESSON 7: Build on Solid Foundations

LESSON 8: Ignore All Distractions

LESSON 9: Leverage Essential Vocabulary

LESSON 10: Practice with Good Teachers

LESSON 11: Dont Get Lost

LESSON 12: Have Adventures

This book would never have been created if I hadnt annoyed thousands of people in the process.

First of all, Tamara Mathov: You have my eternal gratitude for your immense help in creating the Accelerated Spanish system, for correcting dozens and dozens of my dumb mistakes, and for enduring all kinds of ridiculous challenges from me and the many dozens of Spanish students that Ive thrown at you.

My other instructors, Diana, Gaby, Alex, and Sofia: Thank you for putting up with insane student schedules and setting me straight day after day.

To our hundreds of Spanish coaching students: Youre the reason this book exists. Thanks for being my guinea pigs for the last two years. Im more proud of your Spanish fluency accomplishments than I can express.

Tim Ferriss: You laid the groundwork and have set the bar high. Heres to accelerated language learning methods that only get faster and better.

Jim Halpert and Pam Beesly: Thanks for incentivizing me to finish each chapter when all else failed.

To all my friends in Buenos Aires: Marcos, Vicky, Javier the engineer, Javier the conductor, Douglas, Jenny, and dozens of others who entertained me, did life with me, and winced at my bad Spanish for months: It was your friendship that brought the language to life for me.

Samuel, my brother and top go-to concept artist: Your impossibly endless imagination has breathed meaning into Spanish verb conjugations in ways I couldnt have dreamed were possible.

Most importantly, my brother, best friend, and second-harshest critic, Josiah: Thanks for understanding me when nobody else does, for brainstorming some of the most ridiculous mnemonics in the course, and for always bringing me back to earth when I need it most.

If a striped insect the size of an armchair flew into your house, sat on your kitchen stove, told you that it was from another planet, and demanded to be supplied with tea, you would remember that shocking incident for the rest of your life.

But if I presented you a chart of verb conjugations, or a list of Spanish adverbs, youd be unlikely to remember all that information an hour later.

This contrast of situations may sound silly, but its actually very profound. In fact, its the basis of the entire Accelerated Spanish book and course. Our brains arent computers. We dont easily remember numbers and information. Instead, we remember experiences and impressions, especially the strangest ones.

This is why the typical classroom experience lets us down so much. If youre like the majority of US high school graduates, youve (1) taken Spanish at some point and (2) already forgotten most of it. There wasnt anything unique enough or unusual enough to tell your brain to hold on to it, so those hundreds of hours now seem like a total waste of time.

I became frustrated with this system myself, and thats why I developed a course that teaches effectively, the way that native speakers talk, using proven mnemonic techniques that you wont be able to forget once youve learned them.

Ive used this system to coach hundreds of students, bringing dozens to fluency in a short period of time, sometimes as little as eight weeks.

This three-volume system has the potential to make you fully fluent in Spanish.

- The first volume will teach you to think like a Spanish speaker and give you the vocabulary that makes up 50% of the Spanish language.

- The second volume goes on to 80% of the vocabulary and allows you to converse comfortably on a variety of subjects.

- By the end of the third book you will reach practical fluency in Spanish, enough to have an intelligent conversation with a native speaker on practically any subject.

A word of warning, though: Success will only come if you put time and effort into practice. My most successful students are always the ones that are the most diligent and consistent in getting focused practice with their native-speaking Spanish trainers.

Despite all the learning hacks and shortcuts youll find in this book, theres no replacing conversation practice, with serious feedback and critique from Spanish speakers. In order to become fluent, thats something you need to make a top priority. If you do, this course will give you everything else you need.

The concepts and stories that you discover on the pages of this book will seem very strange to you at first. As you find yourself engulfed in an imaginary world with a yellow sky, demented shopkeepers, and clumsy stuffed pandas, your mind and senses will be challenged at every moment. Dont let this discourage you; this is how its meant to be. From the very first chapter, you will see for yourself that to get into the mindset of another language, your mind needs to experience a new world.

LESSON 1

Find Your Voice

A language is not vocabulary. Its a personality.

No matter how many new words you learn, youre not speaking Spanish if youre thinking in English. To be a true Spanish speaker, the first thing you need to do is lose your English-speaking personality and create your Spanish self.

In this first lesson, youll need to forget everything you know about language learning. Were going to take a step back and find your Spanish voice from scratch.

Lesson 1 Theory:

Find Your Voice

Learning another language is not only learning different words for the same things, but learning another way to think about things. - Flora Lewis

I enjoy translating; its like opening your mouth and hearing someone elses voice emerge. - Iris Murdoch

O NE OF MY earliest memories happened at a park when I was about five years old. Two women on a bench were speaking with each other in a foreign language. I was amazed: They seemed to be communicating, and yet to my young English-speaking ears, it sounded like complete gibberish.

In the car on the way home, I proposed a theory to my parents. Perhaps to those foreign women, English also sounds like complete gibberish, with the exact same sonic effect on their ears. If this were true, languages would be like radio stations, each one sounding like indefinite, neutral static to someone who is not tuned in.

But this isnt quite true. To Spanish speakers, English doesnt sound like Portuguese or German. It sounds like English. Rather than sounding like random nonsense, it actually has a voice of its own, even to people who dont understand it.

In fact, every language has its own distinct sound. For example, even if you dont know a word of Mandarin or Arabic, you can easily learn to tell the two apart just by the way they sound.

This Spanish sound is part of the foundation well be laying here at the beginning of .

But we wont be able to talk about the sound of the language without also covering the personality of the language.

I moved to Argentina a year after I started learning Spanish. While there, I made many new friends with whom I only spoke in Spanish. But during the first three months, I didnt feel like myself.