I’ve been learning Spanish on and off for a while now. Since it’s not a language I use every day, my progress has been steady but gradual. Over time, I’ve come to realize that language learning isn’t something you can cram for like an exam. It grows little by little through consistent exposure and regular practice.
Recently, I came across a couple of free resources that have become part of my regular learning routine. More surprisingly, they also changed the way I think about learning Spanish itself.
Learning Spanish from someone teaching English
One YouTube channel I’ve been enjoying is actually not a Spanish-learning channel.
Instead, the creator teaches English to Spanish speakers.
At first glance, that sounds like the opposite of what I needed. But it turned out to be exactly the right level for me.
Because the lessons are explained almost entirely in Spanish while introducing English vocabulary and expressions, I rarely need to focus on the English itself. Instead, I naturally pay attention to the Spanish explanations, transitions, and example sentences.
It almost feels like learning Spanish “through the back door.”
Since I already understand the English examples, my brain can devote its full attention to observing how those same ideas are expressed in Spanish.
I find this much more enjoyable than drilling grammar rules in isolation. Rather than studying the language, I’m simply listening to people use it naturally.
Stories instead of vocabulary lists
Another free resource I’ve been using is Fluent With Stories.
The website organizes short stories according to the CEFR proficiency levels, from A1 through B2. Each story includes native-speaker audio, English translations, vocabulary explanations, quizzes, flashcards, and writing exercises.
I’ve been reading the B1 & B2 stories.
They’re challenging enough that I continue learning new vocabulary, yet easy enough that I can usually follow the overall story without stopping every other sentence to reach for a dictionary.
Personally, I think this is one of the most efficient ways to improve. Words learned through stories tend to stay with me much longer than words memorized from isolated vocabulary lists.
One conversation that completely changed my perspective
While using these resources, I noticed something interesting.
Whenever I encountered a new Spanish sentence, I instinctively analyzed it the same way I had always analyzed English.
Like many students educated in Asia, I learned that English sentences can be grouped into five canonical patterns:
- SV
- SVC
- SVO
- SVOO
- SVOC
For years, these five sentence patterns became my default framework for understanding grammar.
Whenever I saw a sentence, my first instinct was always:
“Which of the five patterns is this?”
Naturally, I tried applying exactly the same framework to Spanish.
One day, while discussing Spanish grammar with ChatGPT, I asked which sentence pattern a particular Spanish sentence belonged to.
The answer surprised me.
ChatGPT pointed out that although Spanish has a default Subject–Verb–Object (SVO) word order, Spanish grammar is generally not taught around the five canonical English sentence patterns (SV, SVC, SVO, SVOO, and SVOC). Instead, Spanish grammar tends to describe sentences by the grammatical role of each element—such as the subject (sujeto), direct object (complemento directo), indirect object (complemento indirecto), and verb—while allowing considerably greater flexibility in word order than English.
That observation completely changed how I began analyzing Spanish sentences.
Thinking in grammatical functions instead of sentence patterns
The more I learned afterward, the more this approach made sense.
Take a simple sentence like:
María compró un libro.
Rather than asking whether it’s an SVO sentence, Spanish instruction is more likely to identify the function of each component:
- María is the subject.
- compró is the conjugated verb.
- un libro is the direct object.
Likewise,
Le di un libro a Juan.
Instead of calling it an SVOO sentence, the explanation focuses on the relationship between the indirect object (le), the direct object (un libro), and the recipient (a Juan).
The emphasis is on understanding what each part of the sentence does, rather than forcing the entire sentence into one of five predefined categories.
Then “Me gusta…” finally made sense
One expression that had always felt slightly awkward to me was:
Me gusta el café.
Whenever I tried to analyze it using English sentence patterns, something always felt backwards.
But once I stopped forcing Spanish into English grammar, the sentence suddenly became much easier to understand.
Spanish simply explains the grammatical roles.
- el café is the grammatical subject.
- me is the indirect object.
- gusta agrees with the subject.
Instead of asking, “Which sentence pattern is this?”, I found myself asking,
“What role is each word playing?”
That small shift in perspective made expressions like me gusta, me encanta, and me interesa feel much more intuitive.
A small realization
Looking back, I think the biggest thing I’ve learned recently isn’t actually new vocabulary.
It’s the realization that modern descriptive linguistics generally holds that grammatical descriptions should reflect the structural properties of the language being described, rather than forcing all languages into a single analytical framework.
English benefits from emphasizing sentence patterns because word order carries much of the grammatical meaning.
Spanish benefits from emphasizing grammatical functions because verb conjugations and a more flexible sentence structure already provide much of that information.
Neither approach is more correct.
They’re simply different lenses for understanding different languages.
Ironically, one of the hardest parts of learning a new language isn’t memorizing vocabulary or conjugations.
It’s realizing that the analytical framework you’ve relied on for years may not be the best one for understanding the next language.
Further Reading
1. R. M. W. Dixon — Basic Linguistic Theory
Dixon argues that grammatical description should be built from the categories that naturally emerge from the language being described, rather than forcing every language into categories inherited from Latin or English.
“Each language should be described in terms appropriate to its own structure.”
Reference
Dixon, R. M. W. (2010). Basic Linguistic Theory, Volume 1: Methodology. Oxford University Press.
2. Dryer, Matthew S. (2006)
Matthew Dryer discusses the distinction between descriptive theory and explanatory theory, arguing that descriptive grammars should use categories that accurately capture the structure of individual languages rather than assuming one universal descriptive framework.
Reference
Dryer, M. S. (2006). Descriptive Theories, Explanatory Theories, and Basic Linguistic Theory.
This is one of the most cited papers in linguistic typology.
3. Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics (2019)
This handbook explains that language typology begins with systematic descriptions of individual languages, and only afterwards are cross-linguistic generalizations made.
In other words:
describe the language first → compare languages second
not
impose one grammatical model on every language.
Reference
The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics, Chapter 29: Language Typology (Cambridge University Press, 2019).
4. De Gruyter — Reference Grammars
This chapter explains why modern reference grammars attempt to describe each language according to its own grammatical system and why descriptive linguistics has largely moved away from forcing languages into inherited grammatical categories.
— Linden Lake
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