Roundup

Of course there is a lot more to Spanish than we have covered in this book. But just think for a moment: when you began reading this book, you probably didn't know any Spanish at all!
We did not need to enter a lot of grammatical jargon to reach this point in the book. It is precisely that tedious process that discourages most people from learning a new language.
The many word examples set forth in the book are really not part of our learning process here, since you already knew the words in English. You had only to learn the Rules that apply to different English-word endings. Simple mathematics will tell you that by learning fourteen Major Rules, you learned approximately twenty thousand words in Spanish, an average of nearly fifteen hundred words for each Major Rule! To comply with the title of this website, you will have had nearly one and three-quarters minutes to learn each of the one-word Major Rules, a time which was arrived at by sample testing and that, for some, might seem a bit ambitious.
Additionally, with the twenty-six Minor Rules, you learned another five thousand words, approximately, which is still nearly two-hundred words per Minor Rule on the average! These averages, naturally, will vary in accordance with your own command of the English language which took you, very likely, years to learn!
Whatever the case, you have learned thousands of words in Spanish, you know what they mean, you know how to read and write them, you know how to pronounce them and you will likely never forget them (unless you forget how to speak English!).
Beyond that, (although not part of the Twenty Minutes) you have also learned how to recognize word genders, how to conjugate verbs and how to search for verbs, nouns, adverbs and adjectives among the Rules we've covered.

That is sufficient reason to give yourself a pat on the back!

If you travel to a Spanish-speaking country after having read this book, it will amaze you how much you do understand, and it should make you curious to learn what you don't yet understand. People in Latin America really don't expect you to know their language but they are pleased and flattered if you at least try. What you have learned in this book will allow you to make the effort and still feel confident that you know the meaning of what you are saying. After all, if you know what a word means in English, and you have now learned how to translate it to Spanish, then you know precisely what it is you are talking about!
In the Appendix, you will find hundreds of identical (and nearly identical) English-Spanish words, including hundreds of verbs, in addition to those we have already covered in the Rules. These 'Matching Words" are meant to further stimulate your desire to speak and study Spanish and to demonstrate that the chasm between English and Spanish is not nearly so wide as you might have thought.
Also in the Appendix, there is a condensed dictionary of practical phrases for the traveler, common usage nouns including those that describe food, office equipment, animals, furniture, services and even insects! There are additional useful verbs (and their conjugations) as well as Spanish translations for colors, shapes and textures and you will even find longhand numbers (so that you can write a check in Spanish). And, on the final page of the Appendix, you'll find a Cheat Sheet that shows all of the Major & Minor Rules - a handy quick reference! (If you're a student, please don't take the "cheat sheet" along to the classroom during exams!).

Pronunciation is the key to learning more of the language, so be sure to read and re-read the first Chapter! Practice out loud, often! Don't be shy! Many people who have studied two or more years of Spanish in high-school very likely know (or remember) only a fraction of the Spanish words you have just learned! More than likely, they would not be able to tell you what the Spanish translations for Superconductive or Coefficient or Anachronism are!
You can now practice your pronunciation on any Spanish word, whether or not we've covered it in this book. If you have made an honest effort in learning the First Chapter, you will know that:

Hasta is pronounced AHS-TAH, and

luego is pronounced LOO-EH-GO

which in Spanish isn't quite "Good-bye". It literally means'Until later", and is the Spanish equivalent of SO LONG!

Food for thought...
Have you ever wondered why you cannot consciously recall events in your life that took place before you could understand words? Surely, there were many important events, not the least of which was moment of birth, and yet these events seem to have evaporated from your life. The images must be there, somewhere, but somehow you not able to retrieve them from your memory bank! Your earliest recollections are sketchy and incomplete, in tune, you might say, with the extent of your vocabulary at the time. It seems that the mind is a storage house of images for which words are the key to their retrieval. If so, then words are far more than just sounds we use to express ourselves or to understand the thoughts of others. They are also the very flags that our mind uses to label each and every file of images and experiences. One might conclude that, by learning more words, we could expand our ability to store more retrievable images and knowledge. What we know, basically, is what we can consciously retrieve. Is it fair, then, to say by expanding our vocabulary we are simultaneously expanding our ability to retrieve stored knowledge? Imagine, then, how much knowing a second language - with its own intrinsic characteristics and expressions - will increase your ability to retrieve information from your memory files!