Medical* Spanish for newbies

[ArteryStudyPainting]

Hi there,

I see white people around me whip out amazing Spanish, and I always wonder who they got so good, what they did, etc. I should've asked them, but it's amazing to see. And it's so helpful. I only know German as a 2nd language, and really want to learn Spanish well. And I mean be as fluent as Cindy who nonchalantly calls Spanish- speakers on the reg and feels comfortable in that setting, both receiving and speaking the language.

I understand there's duolingo, etc., but how do people generally get good w/ Spanish starting from square one? Is that the secret? Do that and then try your best w/ every pt that you can talk to?

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[IMG69]

I assume you grew up with your German, funnily enough i'm learning German. I use anki made from the official word lists, I only read the duolingo stories, I do a few online exercises - plenty of free sources. The highest yield thing is watching netflix in the language you want to learn with both subtitles. However you need a basic vocab list before you can start netflix but i've learnt far more in a much shorter time period watching series compared with the grammar exercises etc.

I started watching Netflix with about a ~1500 vocab, so I understand the context of about 85% of the sentences and I just learn the additional words I don't know. E.g they're searching for something but I don't know what so I find out as the show progresses etc. (or just google the word)

 

[QuizzicalApe]

If you want to try to pick up Spanish, duolingo is not a bad place to start. When you're gaining some basic grammatical mastery though, you'll probably want to get some formal training at some point. If you're at an academic institution later on in your training, you might be able to find classes to audit some day in the future when you have free time again. The best way to polish your spanish is immersion, but not really feasible during medical training, so the second best way is find ways to pick up the basics and build on them when you can.

Failing mastery, emotive gestures, pointing, and asking "¿dolor?" will get you a long way

 

[Matthew9Thirtyfive]

Check out language transfer. They have a channel on SoundCloud and it is awesome. Totally free and encourages learning without rote memorization.

 

[Tangerine123]

Native spanish speaker here!

I'm currently in this situation with German. I got accepted to a PhD/Residency program in Germany with the caveat that I had to reach fluency + pass the Fachsprachprüfung (Equivalent of Step2 CS). Did A1-C1 in around a year and now i'm taking a 1 month medical german course to pass the Fachsprachprüfung.

What I did to reach fluency from scratch in a year was to hire private tutors. Go over important grammar topics alone and solve exercises beforehand. Then when you're with the tutor go over the answers and practice speaking. This is important. Reading and Hearing can be trained alone, but Speaking and Writing require the continous input of an expert.

Vocabulary: Try buying a copy of a book that you've previously read in your native language. You know what the book is about, so you have the chance to juet "focus" on the language part. I recommend genres such as Krimis and Historical Fiction due to the vocabulary they use. Try and avoid Fantasy books. I wouldn't touch newspapers at low levels, more on that later on. There are books adapted to every single CEFR level, even A1.

Always learn vocabulary in context. Don't try and hammer down vocab lists in Anki. It's useless. Instead, switch your movies/series/music/podcasts to spanish and try and learn words in longer sentences.

Always learn nouns with their correct gender (luckily spanish only has 2...) and make a note when learning irregular verbs.

If you can't sorround yourself with native spanish speakers then I suggest you look for a tandem parter. With corona and everything it should be easy to find somebody online.

Don't bother touching the medical stuff before you're at a B2/C1 level. if you have the time I seriously recommend aiming for C1 before you dabble into the medical aspect of this (long but rewarding) journey. C1 is when you're able to express yourself in a more elloquent and elaborate manner. You develop your critical thinking and ability to react fluently/spontaneoulsy.

The medical part is easy. Considering that most of the terminology is based on latin/greek. So then it's all about learning the rest of the vocab and preset phrases that will eventually become more natural.

Learning a new language is an awesome experience! I consider it as a Hobby and I'm still deciding what my 5th language will be after German (Probably Arabic). Something important to take into consideration is that this is a marathon and not a sprint. So don't burn-out!

Good luck!

 

[AnonymousDoctorGuyPerson]

Check out language transfer. They have a channel on SoundCloud and it is awesome. Totally free and encourages learning without rote memorization.

Language Transfer is dope. And as others have said, you really gotta learn to speak and understand Spanish before medical Spanish is useful to you.

I speak Spanish quite well, the easiest way is full immersion. Outside that, doing all of the below is essentially what I did. Though I did have the immersion aspect to an extent growing up and living in a predominately Latino neighborhood, so lots of opportunities to listen to Spanish and speak it with friends.

1) Language Transfer podcast
2) Duolingo
3) Decent Spanish textbook
4) Watching TV in Spanish (with Spanish subtitles at best, no English subtitles)
5) Speaking with both fluent Spanish speakers AND those who learned Spanish (this is the most important, and speaking with both types of people can help you the most, trust).