Can you learn Spanish fast? I give a qualified "yes" as my answer to this question. Select a good program for learning Spanish, whether online or not. Work at it most days, and be sure to review what you are learning. You can do the review through built-in repetition in the program, by going over the lessons again yourself, or by using flashcards. The review is essential for your new Spanish skills to be transferred from short-term to long-term memory. If you do this, chances are good that you will learn Spanish fast.

If you have ever trained a dog, even to the most basic level, you know some things that can help you with  your own process of learning Spanish. Here are four ways that you can improve your methods of Spanish learning. 

Mandarin tones are one of the hardest things about learning to speak Mandarin. There are four tones plus a neutral one, and if you have not been exposed to speaking with the tones in Chinese, it is quite a challenge. It's easy enough to get the rudiments with plenty of practice, but to truly master the tones is something else again. The tones in Mandarin do matter, too -- when I was growing up, my father and our many Chinese friends took delight in telling me when I pronounced the tones wrong. Often, when I tried to say "hello" I said instead, "You are a good horse."

You won't learn to speak Spanish unless you have three things: [1] the motivation to keep yourself going at times when you would rather be doing other things, [2] enough knowledge of how to learn a language that you don't spin your wheels with useless activities, and [3] the tenacity to create habits of working on your Spanish regularly. Every day is best but several times a week can be viable too, provided you actually do it. Unfortunately, most people who set out to learn to speak Spanish tend to stop learning because they don't have all three elements -- motivation, knowledge, and habit.

If you are thinking of beginning Spanish, you need to select how you will learn the language. You could study in a local class, take an online course, use mp3 files, use a program on your computer, or even take an immersion course in a Spanish-speaking country. Each of these methods has pros and cons for you to consider, depending on your own time, budget, and inclination. You may use more than one of these methods for learning to speak Spanish.

If you want to develop your conversational Spanish, one of the best ways to do it is on the web. It's not the only way, but it can be a lot better than taking a local course, for the reasons given in the article.

When I was first learning Chinese, I thought I was learning Mandarin but through a strange twist of fate, I managed to study Cantonese without realizing it. This wouldn't be so likely to happen today. I was able to salvage something from the experience, even though the vocabulary I had learned in Cantonese didn't help me at all in Mandarin.

How to learn Spanish? One valuable part of the process is to listen to as much Spanish as you can during your everyday routines. You can listen in the car, while doing things around the house, on the internet, and more. The author has used all these methods to learn Spanish herself.