As I’ve said so many times, the big thing in language learning is motivation. I keep on repeating it because it’s not about talent, it’s not about classes or teachers or methods, it’s primarily about motivation. The amount of time you spend on the task and noticing–noticing what’s going on in the language. I think the good language learners have become better at noticing. They’ve become more aware, more alert to what’s happening in the language.

In my opinion, Spanish is one of the most attractive languages to learn. We can all be motivated to learn a specific language, like Mongolian or Finnish because we have a friend or a particular interest. Maybe we want to learn Korean to be able to watch Korean dramas or Japanese for amine or business, all kinds of reasons. Spanish is different: there are a number of real big advantages to learning Spanish.

Spanish, I think, is an easy language to learn. It’s also a kind door to the Romance language world. If you learn Spanish, you can learn Portuguese; 200 million people in Brazil. You can learn Italian, which is a phenomenal language and has so much history behind it, and French. Spanish kind of leads you into this world.

So I think there’s tremendous motivation–there should be–for a lot of people to learn Spanish. Not just because if you’re an American there are more and more Hispanic people and you might one day need Spanish to find a job. I think these are minor issues. Language learning is a long road. It is not enough to need the language for a job; you need a deeper level of motivation.

Once you realize that it’s actually a very long haul to get to genuine fluency, that’s where you need that intrinsic motivation. You have to like the language and like the people, at least some of them. There has to be that personal desire and commitment to the language, and I think Spanish is an easy language to get committed to. @communitycoin