This may come as a shock to you, but in the high schools and colleges in the U.S., the method that they are using to teach Spanish is all wrong.

If you want to learn Spanish, you must learn it the same way that you learned English. Let me you ask you a question. Which did you learn first: How to speak English or how to read and write English? Of course you learned how to speak it first.

Then why are they teaching the students in the high schools and colleges to read and write Spanish first? That’s because they don’t expect the students to ever be able to speak Spanish. And that’s exactly what happens. Students take several years of Spanish, graduate, and cannot even speak Spanish.

There’s another problem with learning to read and write Spanish before you learn to speak it. By default, you subconsciously learn how to pronounce the Spanish words the way you would pronounce them in English.

I made that same catastrophic mistake. It took me countless hours and countless dollars in private instruction to correct the error. After much wasted time and money, I discovered that the mistake could have been avoided. I should not have learned to read and write Spanish until I had at least reached the intermediate level of conversational Spanish.

You are going to have to trust me on this one …. Nothing sounds more excruciating to Latin American ears than a “Gringo” with a thick American accent speaking Spanish. How do I know? Because now that I speak Spanish fluently, every time I hear an American with a strong American accent speaking Spanish it makes me cringe.