Review: "If you want to learn to speak Spanish, then you gotta SPEAK Spanish!"  That sums it all up, and it is correct.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 29, 2012
There is no other way... It is a very simple truth: If you want to learn to speak Spanish, then YOU GOTTA SPEAK SPANISH!You can learn vocabulary, and you can learn grammar, and you can learn verbs and use flash cards... All that is good, but it will advance your language-learning very little.But if you want to learn to speak Spanish, the author tells us: you gotta speak in Spanish whenever you can!  It doesn't matter if you make mistakes.  Nobody cares about your mistakes.  What matters is that you have to communicate with Spanish speakers, so don't be afraid to speak to them... speak!Don't expect anybody to speak YOUR language when you are in THEIR country.  And if you hang out with a lot of foreigners and you insist on speaking your language in a foreign country, you're not going to learn the foreign language.That should be self-evident, but it isn't to too many students who give up and never learn a second language because they are afraid to make mistakes.  It is not even self-evident to many language teachers, who only teach grammar and vocabulary... it doesn't work very well...Grammar and vocabulary are important, but speaking the language, right or wrong, is the most important.  Mistakes will get corrected eventually, and the sense of being able to communicate now will help more than anything else.The author tells a good story, and he is a born teacher.  I enjoyed the story of his travels through Central America and  South America, ending in Brazil and another language for him...And I agree completely with how he now teaches English to his Brazillian students.