How To Push Through A Spanish Learning Plateau

Bodybuilders are very familiar with the phenomenon of the muscle plateau:  you continue working every bit as hard as you ever have, but progress seems to slow and occasionally, backpedal.  For whatever reason, you just aren’t building muscle anymore and it seems as though you’re working awfully hard merely running in place.  While bodybuilding is one field where this phenomenon is widely known, the occasional plateau will frustrate students of any discipline.  It happens to guitarists, cyclists, intellectuals, and yes, even Spanish language learners.

Switch It Up To Push Through To The Other Side

Fortunately, the solution to a plateau in almost any discipline is the same:  change it up.  What do bodybuilders do when they are no longer seeing the gains they once were?  They change their routine, attacking their muscles from completely different angles often tricks the body into building muscle again.  This makes perfect sense when you consider the reason for the plateau in the first place was that your body had adapted to having the same stress placed on it day after day, week after week.  A new workout introduces new stresses, stresses your body is completely unprepared to handle.  Hence, muscle growth resumes.

The same idea can work for you when your Spanish efforts reach a plateau.  The reason for the plateau is that your mind has become accustomed to the same old stimulation over and over again.  It’s not that what you’ve been doing isn’t effective, it’s just that you’ve saturated your brain from that particular angle for now.  The solution, as with bodybuilding, is to change it up.

If you’ve been focusing on grammar drills using the FSI program, for example, put that program down for a week or two and focus on beefing up your listening or reading skills.  A good Spanish read will reinforce the vocabulary you’ve already learned and expose you to new vocabulary you probably wouldn’t come across in a typical grammar book.

Similarly, if you’ve been using a  program like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone that minimizes the importance of grammar drills and you’ve reached an impasse, it might be worth it to pick up a quality grammar workbook like Marcial Prado’s Advanced Spanish Grammar or my all-time favorite Spanish grammar workbook, Dorothy Richmond’s Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses for a while.  The grammar you learn from these workbooks will not only help you advance more quickly through your program of choice, but will help your brain switch gears and challenge it in new ways.

This brief interlude can make all the difference in the world between advancing your Spanish to the next level and struggling with a demoralizing plateau.  Besides, if learning Spanish becomes a boring chore, you’ll probably stop doing it.  Switching things up a bit can help out with that aspect, as well.