Mexico Reynosa Mission

My mission president loved telling me this story about this one elder that served in our mission who really struggled with learning Spanish at first, but what he did was he learned two phrases in Spanish. He learned, do you know who this is? Sabes quien es? And also, do you want to learn more? Quieres aprender mas? So what he would do is he would take a picture of Jesus Christ with him on the buses because there's a lot of buses in our mission. He would hold it up and he would start asking everybody on the bus, do you know who this is? If they said yes, he would ask, do you want to know more? Then his companion would take down their information so they could visit them again. And they got a lot of contacts this way and he was very successful and he became district leader after that. But he got way better with time on the mission and his Spanish became one of the best I've ever known.

One suggestion that I would make to anyone trying to learn a new language is to try to make it fun. I remember within the first few weeks of being in the mission I went on splits with one of my zone leaders and he was finishing up his mission and in my mission they had to learn English and we were expected to learn Spanish of course. So one of the things that we would do is we would choose a vocabulary word and we would have to try to sneak that word into one of the conversations with the next person we saw on the street and if we couldn't do it then we had to buy the other one a treat like a like a soda or a candy bar and we got so good at it we used words such as moco which means booger or axilla which means elbow and just words like that and it's a really fun way to practice your language and also getting out of your comfort zone while doing it it was really fun.

Something that really helped me learn the language was reading the Book of Mormon cover-to-cover in Spanish. Our mission president gave us a challenge to do it in three months. It kind of stretched my ability, but it also grew or helped grow my faith and understanding of the Book of Mormon and at the same time learning gospel vocabulary, phrases, so that I can attest to the learning of a language through reading the Book of Mormon.

So my advice would be to not be afraid of making mistakes, be willing to put in the hours, the work that you need, ask a lot of questions, ask your companion, ask the members or just strangers on the street what words mean, and that way you can write them down and practice them again later. Again, don't be worried about trying to have a perfect accent. Try your best, but just remember even if you don't have a perfect accent, if you don't sound like a native, you're still going to be learning the language at the same time, and you can only get better with time.