5 Tips To Balance Your Time and Learning Spanish
Do you ever find it challenging to balance your time and studying Spanish?
If so, then you know it’s harming your Spanish learning ability.
But in today’s article, you’ll discover 5 crucial tips that can help you solve this problem quickly and easily.
We all know that if you want to become fluent in Spanish, you have to be consistent.
If you’re not consistent, you’re never going to reach the level you want to achieve.
But it’s hard to be consistent. Why? Usually, life simply gets in the way.
Recently we held a live 6-week Spanish learning workshop.
We learned from that training that the biggest obstacle for many people—in regards to improving their Spanish—is actually showing up every day and doing the work.
Of course, life happens, and most of the time, it’s not our fault.
But there are ways to rig the game in our favor to help us with this situation.
That’s what I really want to talk about in today’s article.
Schedule Your Time and Location
The first thing you can do to really balance your time with learning Spanish is to schedule a time and location for your study every day.
It’s like setting a date with yourself.
For example, you can say, “Every morning at 9:00 AM I’m going to study Spanish at my kitchen table.”
When you know that every day, it makes it much easier to do.
It makes it much easier to show up.
Often, people think that they have this problem of not having time to study Spanish, but in reality, they have the time. They just didn’t plan it properly.
By scheduling your time and location and then trying to organize the rest of your day around that, it is much more likely that you will study Spanish.
That’s the first step, to set a time, set a location every single day.
Stick to this. It will help you build the habit of studying Spanish, of practicing Spanish.
It’s a great way to make it easy to incorporate it into your life…
And makes it more difficult for “life to get in the way.”
Practice Early
The next tip goes right in line with the previous one.
That is to try to practice Spanish early in the morning.
If learning Spanish is something that you really want to do, that should be at the top of your to-do list.
Of course, this is going to have many benefits.
You’re going to be entirely focused.
You will be well-rested.
It’ll be easier to concentrate and get more out of the training.
What I’ve also found is that the longer you put off studying, the much less likely I’m either going to do it…
Or the much less likely you will be as focused as you should be to get the results you want.
By moving your Spanish practice to earlier in the day, you make it much more likely that you’re going to study and that your study session will be much better.
If you don’t have time in the morning, try to start your day 30 minutes earlier.
By doing this, you give yourself the extra time that’s needed.
So you wake up 30 minutes earlier and go through your whole morning routine…
But instead of being done with your morning routine and having to go to work, now you’re done with your morning routine, and you have 30 minutes of free time.
Maybe it’s at that time that you study Spanish.
Or maybe you just wake up 30 minutes earlier and jump straight into learning Spanish.
But by studying it earlier and by maybe getting up 30 minutes earlier to open this little window to give you extra time if you just have no time.
The truth is, we all have the time. We just waste it doing other things.
More Spanish Integration
Another way you can have more time for Spanish is to implement it while doing other activities.
Executing this depends on your level of Spanish.
That’s because if you’re a beginner, that’s starting from scratch, you probably can’t do this.
In fact, the most challenging part of learning Spanish is getting out of that beginner phase.
That’s because the beginner phase forces you to be focused every time you are practicing and learning.
But it will be easier to consume more content in Spanish when you break out of that period.
At that point, you can listen to it when you are walking the dog, commuting to work, or washing the dishes.
Why can’t you do this if you’re are at the beginning stages of learning Spanish?
If you’re just listening to content that you don’t understand, it will just sound like gibberish to you. You won’t be able to learn or retain any words.
As a beginner, you need more attention to detail to comprehend the content.
You will have to compare transcripts, translate words, etc.
But as you get better at Spanish, things change. That’s because you do hear and understand the majority of the words you are consuming.
Then you can spend that entire hour commute to work listening to Spanish. It becomes easier to compound the amount of input received.
This will lead to rapid improvement.
But again, this ONLY works if you can understand the majority of what’s being spoken.
To quickly summarize this tip: Once you get to the point where you begin to understand Spanish better, you can incorporate Spanish into other activities.
But keep in mind, these have to be tasks that don’t require a lot of thinking.
Don’t listen to Spanish while you’re writing a paper.
You don’t want Spanish just to be a background activity.
Many people mistake listening to a podcast and hearing a podcast in the background as being the same thing, but they are not.
This works best when you are doing activities that don’t require a lot of brain energy…
This is why I mentioned, “commutes to work, washing dishes, walking the dog, etc.”
Go Slower To Learn Spanish Faster
I know this will sound like quite the paradox…
But the next thing you can do is lower the amount of time you spend studying Spanish daily.
Most people think that they have to study for hours and hours a day to become fluent.
They study an hour, two hours one day, and they quickly get burnt out.
They do that for two or three days, maybe a week, and then they’re done with Spanish.
It’s better to do just 30 minutes a day.
This is what I told everybody that participated in our workshop.
“Give me 30 minutes a day for the next six weeks, and I guarantee you’ll improve your Spanish.”
If, for the next 90 days, you give me 30 minutes a day of practicing Spanish, you will see significant results.
It’s just 30 minutes a day.
Everybody has 30 minutes they can dedicate to it.
The problem is that when we think we have to spend all these hours studying Spanish, it prevents us from ever sitting down to actually do it.
The thought is, “Why am I going to sit down and partake in something that I know I’m just going to stop?”
But 30 minutes, it’s easy.
Lower the amount of time you spend daily—frequency and consistency over a long period trump daily duration
Make Spanish a Part of Your Life
The next tip—which all the previous tips lead to—is making Spanish a part of your life.
When interacting with Spanish becomes a part of your daily routine, it’s almost impossible for it not to become an essential part of your life.
Don’t think of it as a “chore” but as a way of life.
It’s a simple mindset shift that changes the game.
But there are more ways you can integrate Spanish.
Start by changing your smartphone to Spanish instead of English.
When you are watching TV or the news, watch it in Spanish.
If you like to listen to music, listen to it in Spanish.
If you like listening to Podcasts, try to do it in Spanish.
If you like reading, try to read a book in Spanish.
The more you choose to integrate Spanish into your life, the better.
Let's Wrap This Up
If you are struggling to balance your time with learning Spanish, try to implement the 5 tips we’ve mentioned today.
The main thing they do is help you stay consistent, which is the most important key of learning Spanish.
Look, there are many excellent Spanish training and teachers out there, tons of programs, apps, etc.
But at the end of the day, you can have the most perfect plan, but if you don’t stick to it, you’re never going to see the results you want.
You have to build a plan that’s easy to stick to, and once you do that, you’ll easily be able to make Spanish a part of your life.
Once you do that, the rest will be history. You’ll be fluent before you know it.
If you are really looking to take your Spanish to the next level, then check out our FREE 3 Secrets To learn Spanish faster training, where I will show you my 3 most significant secrets to become fluent in Spanish faster.
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