Spanish lessons from an old guitar guy

Having discovered the great joy of “speaking to learn” after years of the opposite (with precious little to show for it needless to say), I am, possibly unlike probably most of your students, fascinated by how the Synergy approach works. While understanding how it works is irrelevant to learning to speak, I suspect being able to explain the “how” might be useful for persuading the skeptical to try it. Now, I hope I am not stepping on your toes or only confusing the issue, but I would like to take a stab at explaining how the approach might work for those in need of a theoretical explanation. Here goes: It’s not that learners don’t need rules to learn anything as complex as a language; rather it’s a matter of how the rules are learned. Whereas the traditional approach to teaching languages is DEDUCTIVE – one learns the rules first, then the application – the Synergy approach is INDUCTIVE, meaning it starts with real-world speech, from which the rules are derived. Whereas the deductive approach, at least to begin with, has very little to do with everyday speech and requires the sort of concentration and application associated with sitting on hard chairs on hot days, the inductive approach focuses on the very thing that brings people to a language – the desire to communicate – and learning the rules occurs almost completely in the background, i.e. in the brain/mind of the learner. While the skeptical may have a hard time believing this can work, it is useful pointing out this is precisely how children learn a language. Often with a single example a child can learn that a verb ending in “ar” (which is simply a sound to begin with) ends in “o” when referring to the self and “an” when referring to others. The truly wonderful part of this that it not necessary that the learner ever be able to express this rule in order to use it – it is simply how the human brain works. Far too much emphasis in language teaching/learning is placed on articulation of the rules and far too little on the application. Hope this doesn’t hopelessly confuse the matter, but being far too much the skeptic myself, I think many wannabe learners need a bit of an explanation how the method works. Once convinced to give it a try, the “magic” of the method becomes almost instantly obvious.

Marcus ….. my husband and I lived in Coahuila Mexico for several years working with our church.
We knew no Spanish when we went in 1990 …. We tried taking private lessons while there and it was good. We have a wonderful vocabulary and VERY elementary sentence construction. We were already in our 40’s at that time. Because of the dangers of traveling in Mexico, we have not gone back since 2008. On that trip in 2008 our Spanish had improved so much and was so much easier for us because we had been studying your 16 lesson Senergy Spanish lessons. We continue to bring them out every now and again to “practice” before we totally lose it (because we are not using it). The biggest problem we had in Mexico was that we lived with and most of our time was spent with Americans. We were not submersed in Spanish. Long story short we are planning to make a trip back to the area in Coahuila and also a trip to Nicaragua soon. HELP!! What would you suggest that we purchase next to continue our progress!? Thank you in advance, Juanice Teer (and husband James) In the meantime we will continue our Senergy lessons and are waiting to hear from you. ¡muchas gracias!