Learning the alphabet isn’t just for preschoolers or elementary school! At least it isn’t when you’re learning a brand new language 🙂 One of my own language-learning “disaster” stories has to do with the alphabet. I took homeschool Spanish 1 and 2 classes in high school and I minored in Spanish in college. I assume that my teachers taught me the alphabet at some point, however it wasn’t something we reviewed often.
The bottom line: I didn’t really know the alphabet in Spanish. No big deal, right? Wrong.
Fast-forward a few years: I was living in Spain and I had to make a phone call to my insurance company. Keep in mind that I was fluent enough at that point to carry on a conversation with the insurance folks over the phone. However, at the end of our conversation, the agent asked me to spell out my email address so they could send me a confirmation email. What does a person need to know to spell over the phone? The alphabet.
I’m not sure which letters I said correctly or if that email ever got to me. The bottom line is that I immediately realized that I didn’t know the alphabet. As you can imagine, I went home that day and learned the alphabet at age 25 and after almost 10 years of learning Spanish.
It’s never too early (or too late) to learn the Spanish alphabet!
Want to learn right now? Watch this video from one of my favorite Spanish YouTube teachers and then play a game of hangman in Spanish!