Welcome to Habloco, a new place to immerce yourself in Spanish, learn the grammar that makes your sentences flow, and discover the best Spanish content from across the internet.
Everything here is curated by me, Chris, a Spanish learner from Cardiff in the UK.
I’ve been learning Spanish since around 2013, but for the first few years learnt at quite a slow pace – a few Duolingo and Babbel lessons here and there, learning basic vocabulary, conjugations and sentence structure, but nothing that gave me any opportunity to speak (other than to myself).
In 2014 I started beginners’ Spanish lessons in Cardiff, which at least gave me the opportunity to practice my basic and awkward words and phrases with others.
In 2015, I moved to Madrid for 2 months and started intensive Spanish classes, and that’s when things finally started to pick up. At first it was terrifying. The classes were taught entirely in Spanish, something which I hadn’t even considered would be the case, and it took a few weeks to get used to get used to the fact I was spending 4 hours a day understanding just a tiny percentage of what was going on in the class around me.
It was on that first intensive Spanish trip that I picked up my first Spanish book – Una Serie de Catastróficas Desdichas (A Series of Unfortunate Events) – and for the first time felt the amazing feeling of being able to understand something written in another language.
Sure, I didn’t understand very much of it, and would be exhausted by the time I’d read a single page, but I understood enough to get the gist of what was going on.
I returned to Madrid in 2017, and spent 7 months there, again taking daily intensive classes that finally gave me enough Spanish to comfortably hold a basic conversation with a Spaniard.
The most rewarding feeling was when I applied for my Spanish NIE (Numero de Identificación de Extranjeros). It’s a tricky card to get, with Spanish bureaucracy making the simplest of things take far longer than they need to.
The meetings are conducted entirely in Spanish, and my advisor, after shuffling through my neatly organised pile of bank statements, photocopies of identity documents and a letter from my language school confirming my place, told me that unfortunately they wouldn’t be able to grant me a place as I had neither a job in Spain nor private medical insurance, and I needed one of the two. Having a job would have granted me access to public medical care, and I needed some kind of medical care before I could get my NIE.
To date, the largest conversation I’d had with a Spaniard who wasn’t a professor was ordering a coffee, but it was now or never, and my underutilised Spanish brain kicked into action. I managed to talk the guy round, explaining that my course was accredited by the Institute of Cervantes, and that my medical care would be covered by the UK’s health service because I was studying an accredited educational course.
I’m not 100% sure if I was actually right about all of that, but either way it was enough to talk him around, and I walked out half an hour later with my NIE.
A few hours later and I had a Spanish bank account – another meeting conducted entirely in Spanish – but by this point I was on a roll and the prospect of a spontaneous second administrative meeting in a day didn’t even phase me.
Today, I’m back living in Cardiff but practicing and improving my Spanish daily, and with plenty of Spanish trips lined up.
It’s been a struggle to get to the level I’m at today, and there have been plenty of concepts which took me a long time to get my head around. That’s why I started Habloco. It’s a brand-new resource and educational platform, explaining Spanish grammar from the basics right through to the most complex of topics, with plenty of links to other useful resources from around the internet.
It’s designed to help you learn Spanish as efficiently as possible, with recommendations on the best software, TV shows, films, books and methods of learning the language. Each page also has a comments section, where you can ask questions or give your own advice, and perhaps even help out other language learners.
Gracias por venir, y espero que te sea de ayuda.