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One Month Lingo
Introduction
10/05/2017 11:11 am ET | Updated May 03, 2019
If you are an expat or traveler, you may be familiar with the frustration of memorizing tons of vocabulary and verb tenses, only to find yourself quickly overwhelmed when attempting to converse with native speakers.
At One Month Lingo we've experimented with literally dozens of language learning methods for French and Spanish. In that time, one technique has consistently proven to provide the biggest "bang-for-the-buck" for building practical speaking skills in the least amount of time and effort.
The Dialogue Deconstruction Method has helped hundreds of expats, travelers, and other students in over a dozen countries learn to communicate in their target language - in a fraction of the time of traditional methods. 
This technique was designed to to help both beginner and advanced students to quickly improve their ability to understand native French speakers. 
The following interactive lesson is designed to demonstrate how this technique works and to show you how you can use it to rapidly improve your listening comprehension in French.

(Note: This lesson is based on conversation from our One Month French conversational course. At the end of this lesson, you'll also have the opportunity to sign up for a no obligation, 7-day trial of the full course. )

As you proceed through the lesson, you will hear a short conversation in Spanish and then be asked to complete a series of exercises. You should complete all of the exercises when prompted.

Click the "Start Lesson" button below to start your lesson now:

Here's what our students have to say 
about One Month French:
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Why Do Most People Fail to Learn Conversational Spanish?
If you have ever purchased a typical Spanish book, or taken a Spanish course in college or high school, then you probably spent 90% of your time focused on vocabulary and grammar and less than 10% - if any - actually hearing and speaking Spanish out loud.

You probably even thought that this made sense - you have to learn lots of words before you start learning how to speak, right? 

The truth is you need relatively few words to be able to get through a typical Spanish conversation. Based on an analysis of the frequency distribution of words in Spanish, a person with a vocabulary of only 1000 words would be able to recognize about 88% of the Spanish used in everyday conversation. 

In fact, if you learned only the 600 most commonly used words, you would be able to understand about 80-85% of the words in spoken Spanish - enough to get through most basic conversations. 

The real problem for most beginner to intermediate Spanish learners is that there is a significant gap between their "paper" vocabulary - the number of words they can recognize on paper - and their ability to understand the same words in real-time spoken conversation.

To see what we mean, try the following exercise from our conversational Spanish course One Month Spanish. 

The audio clip below contains a short dialogue between a man and the bellhop at his hotel. Most of the words used in the dialogue should be familiar to students who know a modest amount of Spanish vocabulary.

Listen to the clip below and see how well you can understand the discussion. 

Note: Be sure to listen to the audio before reading the transcript that follows.
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Once you have finished listening to the clip, click the button below to show the written transcript:
Compare your results: Did you understand the material better through listening or reading?
 
If you answered "reading" then your issue is not lack of sufficient vocabulary, but rather your inability to mentally process oral speech as quickly as the written word.

If you want to improve your ability to understand oral Spanish, the answer is not just learning more and more vocabulary, but rather improving your ability to recognize and understand the Spanish that you already know.

In the next section, we'll show you how to take advantage of a little known, but highly effective technique designed to help you understand spoken Spanish as easily as if you were seeing the words printed on paper. 
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