Miranda Gabbott

The history of the Spanish language is inseparable from the bloody history of the land now known as Spain — and Spain’s colonization of the Americas.

The process of learning Spanish is mentally stimulating, but it can feel wildly inefficient—especially if you compare the painstaking process of committing new verb forms to memory with learning a language as a child.

One reason is that languages were taught differently back then. Most modern second language learning methods are inductive—students practice producing sentences in a target language and eventually infer the underlying patterns.