Understand This and You Can Learn Any Language

[00:00:00]There's one thing more than any other thing that will determine if you can successfully learn to speak a new language or not. And that thing is, let's pretend you speak English and you're learning Spanish. Do you see Spanish through English or do you see the world through Spanish? If you're looking at the language that you're learning through a language that you already speak, there's a very good chance that you'll never learn to speak that language. But if you can learn to use the language that you're learning as a way to see the world, there's a very good chance you'll successfully be able to learn to speak that language.

[00:00:37]I'm Tony Marsh, former military linguist. I've taught Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic to the military, NATO, and others. And in this video, I'm going to give you a minimalist, universal template that you can use to see reality in its simplest form, show you how it applies to English and Spanish, and give you tips for how you can use it for any language. So, all languages essentially do the same thing.

[00:01:00]They describe our reality. On the screen here, I have a cube. Let's let this cube represent space. I mean any space. It could be a room, house, city, planet, the whole universe. Doesn't matter what scale it's on. And you're inside the cube. So, if you're at home right now, the cube is your house. The cube could be YouTube and virtually you're on YouTube. Anyway, every language is going to have a way to say that. A way to say, "I exist. I'm here. I'm present." In English, that's "I am." In Spanish, that's "Estoy." Spanish is interesting because it makes a difference between "I'm here" as in "I'm present in this particular space" and "Soy" which means "I exist in some kind of absolute sense, not relative to the particular time and space of that cube." If you're learning a language other than English or Spanish, you'll want to look into how that language deals with existing.

[00:01:58]Important announcement, I'm hosting travel language learning trips in 2027.

[00:02:03]We can go anywhere in the world. There's a link to a survey in the description of this video. If travel language learning sounds interesting to you, go fill out the survey. Now, the next thing that happens in this cube is there are things around you. That can be persons, places, or things. For example, if there's a picture on the wall, let that dot represent the picture. If there's a tree outside your window, let that dot represent the tree. When there's more than one thing, we say there are.

[00:02:30]Spanish says I to denote the presence of something. And even if there's more than one, it's still I. So, there are many people outside.

[00:02:39]Hay muchas personas afuera. How does the language that you're learning deal with the presence and absence of things?

[00:02:47]Every language has a tool for saying what things are, naming things, and describing things. For example, this is a beautiful flower. This is a book. That is good. In Spanish, all you need is S.

[00:03:03]That's good. Es bueno. In Spanish, also uses está in the same way that we talked about estoy. Está where that thing is.

[00:03:12]It's on the wall. Está en la pared. The next thing that can happen is you can move. So, as you see the guy going kind of from one corner to the other, every language in the world is going to have a word for I go. In Spanish, that's voy.

[00:03:26]Whenever you go, you go from somewhere to another place, and that's known as prepositions. From here to there.

[00:03:34]Spanish, from home to the beach. De la casa a la playa. From New York to LA. De Nueva York a Los Angeles. And whenever you go from point A to point B, there's something on each side. For example, a street, a path, a track, a hallway, a sidewalk, whatever route you take, there's going to be a preposition to name that route. English can be by, by way of, via, through, even down the street or out the window. In Spanish, that preposition is always por. So, down the street is por la calle.

[00:04:13]Out the window, por la ventana. That's 100% the way everything works.

[00:04:19]The only thing we don't have represented here in the cube is that person's perception, how they feel about it, their likes, wants, and needs, what they're thinking, sensing, seeing, hearing, touching, tasting. So, I would add those verbs, put them very high on your list of verbs to learn in whatever language you're learning. So, that cube situation is always happening, it's happening right now. It was also happening before and will also be happening later. In Spanish, that's antes, ahora, y después. That's why every language has a past, present, and future tense. I hope this video helps you see 4D reality in a simple and universal way. And I hope that instead of trying to learn Spanish by trying to see Spanish through English, that you jump to the head of the line and do what you need to do, which is see the world through the language that you're learning. Thanks for watching.