Tips 100: How to Diversify your Spanish Skills by Solving Problems

Last year, when I was living in Madrid, I was chatting to a friend about a very addictive chocolate biscuit we have in Australia. She said she would love to try them. Immediately after uttering those words, we both thought—Madrid is a big city, we could find them here, right?

What else was I going to say—challenge accepted!

The search started by simply googling ‘galletas’ in Madrid. After some digital searching, I did some searching by foot. I had a list of shops in mind that I wanted to try. I tried the big department stores and smaller boutique type chocolate shops. I spoke to a number of shop owners. Each conversation edging me one step closer to my goal.

Long story short, after 2 days of looking, I was successful! In the end, I found what I was looking for.

In order to find what I was looking for, I needed to throw away my English and start doing some detective work in Spanish.

I knew I couldn’t find what I was looking for by simply googling it in English. I had to step outside my usual method of finding things to see if I can leverage my Spanish to solve the problem.

This week for the mindset podcast, I challenge you to see if you can solve a problem using your Spanish.

If you are living in a Spanish speaking country, the challenge could be:

• Looking for a cheap restaurant to eat. If you are in Spain try this line “bueno, bonito, barato” when asking about a place to find cheap quality food.
• Maybe you want to find a place to buy a good pair of jeans.
• You could be looking to find something from home—like the chocolate biscuits I was looking for.
• Something as simple as finding a local SIM card for your phone.
• Or simply looking for the meaning of a new word in Spanish that you haven’t seen before.

If you are at home or in an English speaking country, you could try to:

• Look up the typical food in a country you are interested in, for example, Peru, but when you are doing the google search, do it in Spanish. Search for something like “la comida de Perú”.
• If you are planning a trip to Mexico you could try looking up “los mejores lugares turisticos para visitar en México”.

There are also other problems that you could try to solve. In today’s podcast, I also mentioned some Spanish expressions. The challenge is to discover their meaning with English.

To find the meaning to the expressions I mentioned the website is http://expresionesyrefranes.com/.

And a few expressions I suggest you look up are:

• Al pan, pan y al vino, vino.
• Con la miel en los labios.
• El mundo es un pañuelo.
• La pescadilla que se muerde la cola.

This week we celebrate the 100th episode of the podcast. The episode is also being released almost exactly a year since the first episode.

To celebrate the milestone, I’m running a competition this week. I’m going to give away 3 Spanish to Spanish dictionaries. If you want to enter the competition you have be on the Real Fast Spanish subscribers list.

Listen to today’s podcast for all of the details for the competition.

How else can you use your Spanish to solve a problem?

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