The choice to learn any language is indeed a big one to make, and the process is often scary, and can be long, if learning is not approached correctly. However, in the end, the choice to gain new language skills is always worth it. More and more, in the United States, Spanish is becoming increasingly prevalent, and because of this, it’s also becoming more, necessary to have some degree of Spanish fluency.

Below are 3 points to illustrate how life would change if people learned conversational Spanish, and why we need to gain these skills regardless.

1. Being bilingual has been proven to expand horizons, increase IQ and cause biologically beneficial restructuring in the brain. More than that, a knowledge of Spanish will enable you to experience the world, its people, its beauty, and it’s cultural offerings, in an entirely different way.

2. Expanding on this cultural openness gained by being bilingual, and in particular being able to speak Spanish, it should be noted that travel, whether domestically or abroad will be made easier. There is a whole world out there to explore, and because you have knowledge of Spanish you will also be able to pick up the basics of other romance languages quite easily.

3. As the population of Spanish speakers grows, and ages, many of these people will prefer their native language, and thus will need someone to help them communicate their needs. This pervasiveness is apparent, as everything from packaging and instruction books, to classrooms and national anthems is being made bilingual. It’s not going to change, and honestly, it’s a fun challenge. Conversational Spanish is incredibly easy to learn, and so worth it in the end.

Thinking about learning Spanish online? Having to deal with people who doubt your decision to use the internet? Well, let me give you some positive ammunition.

Once upon a time not too too long ago, the Internet was perceived as a very shady place when it came to things like learning materials. But, those days are no more, and now, the Internet is one of the go-to places for any sort of educational resource, as long as you know what you’re looking for.

This includes language learning, and just a quick search on Google will tell you that it’s possible to find information and basic learning materials on just about every language that is still around today, and even some of those that are not. So, if anyone has told you to stay off the Internet while learning a language, you can feel free to ignore them now.

It is indeed possible to learn Spanish online, and I would even venture to say that you can learn more from the online methods than you could from a standard classroom based method. This is of course not referring to any intensive programs abroad, because the best way still to learn a language is to be completely and totally immersed in it.

However, the Internet can bring you close to complete immersion if you work diligently with it, and possess a learning program that is rich in multimedia content. A stuffy classroom full of just as jittery as you are learners though, in most cases, can do no such a thing, other than perhaps make you loathe book drills and lack confidence when speaking.

Though I have achieved a high degree of fluency by a variety of methods, I had some bad experiences early on, which left me for a long time without enough confidence to even use the skills I had garnered. What were these bad experiences? The same ones I am telling you to be weary of, which all revolve around the traditional approach.

But the frustration that I felt from knowing, yet never completely feeling comfortable with Spanish, soon eased when I caught on to the “new school” approach (online learning, and stand alone language software) and left the “old school” philosophy behind. Even research supports the fact that the power of the internet has breathed new life into language instruction.

As I mentioned earlier, experience abroad, and ideally a home stay experience is the absolute best way to learn any language including Spanish, however, when this is not possible, a combination dynamic immersion approach can be accomplished quite nicely through any number of online methods.