Let's work on expressing abstract ideas in Spanish.

Join us on a rigorous step-by-step journey to fluency.

I'm Timothy, and this is LearnCraft Spanish.

Now that we've spent the first two weeks laying our fluency foundation, we get to spend a lot more time on vocabulary and real-life expression in Spanish.

For most of this week, we'll be working on learning the most important verb in Spanish.

But we're never going to be totally done with the deeper stuff, so we're still going to spend our Monday episodes on some

important higher-level concepts, such as language theory, study hacks, and deeper grammar.

Today we'll be talking about expressing abstract ideas in Spanish. This may seem like a strange

thing to do in just the third week of learning the language,

since many people consider this to be an advanced skill.

But being able to express abstract ideas is actually core to being fluent,

and we've found that you'll become proficient much faster if you learn how to do this as early as possible.

Here's why. It's super easy to learn the names of random objects and actions such as chair, book, or eating.

This is the same thing as learning a new name for something in your own language. For example, if you have a large

fiction book, you could easily find a bunch of new words for it. You could call it a novel,

or a volume, or a tome, or you could call it a libro, or a book, or a shoe. Learning these new labels is fun, but it's not the same thing as deep

language learning. It's just learning alternative names for things. We can do that anytime. And in my

experience, it's especially fruitful after we've deeply learned how the language works. But deeply learning the language

requires a different set of priorities. Let's say you want to express something like this sentence.

I'd prefer that they do it by this afternoon. On the surface, this might seem like a very simple sentence. If you're a

native English speaker, it doesn't require any fancy vocabulary. But learning to say a sentence like

this in a second language requires some really deep knowledge of how the language works. Not only that, but most of what we say in

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