Tips, Proven Techniques, and Reviews

I received an email from Tell Me More not long ago, telling me more (sorry, couldn’t resist) about their new version of their program for learning Spanish. I had been pretty hard on it in my review of the last version, so I was glad to hear about Version 10.

No doubt about it, this is one of the best-selling programs for learning Spanish, with over seven million users. [click to continue…]

Tagged as: reading Spanish

Fluenz Spanish is now up to five levels you can do, though of course you can still get just the beginning one or two if you prefer.

Anyway, here is a list I just found on their website of what you can expect from each level. Of course, when you are actually doing the lessons it’s more fun than this list may make it sound! You can see this list at this page about Fluenz Spanish and you can also do a demo and get more of a sense of their approach to language learning.

Level 1: Communicating right away

Tagged as: Fluenz Spanish

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to learn Spanish or to improve your existing Spanish? If so, how are you planning to implement this resolution?

Ahh… that’s where most resolutions break down! The planning is too ambitious and grand… or there isn’t any. Try making a small plan, whether it is to work on a program  like Fluenz Spanish or Rocket Spanish say 5 days a week, or to learn 3 new words a day, or something of the sort.

As for me, this year I am not making a learn-Spanish resolution as such, but I intend to keep researching different programs for this website and will inevitably pick up some more Spanish that way!

This year is shaping up to be a bit different for us, as we have our house in Mexico up for sale.  [click to continue…]

Here’s an enjoyable short video that has been watched almost 5 million times on Youtube:

And here it is with English subtitles:

Just in case the embedding doesn’t work for some reason, here is the url for the first one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngRq82c8Baw

Great fun!

And Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year!

Rosana

If you have ever trained a dog, even to the most basic level, you know some things that can help you with your own process of learning Spanish. Here are four:

[1] Repetition is essential. If you want your dog to come when called, for example, you will need to practice over and over and over. If you want Spanish verbs to slip off your tongue naturally, you will need to practice over and over and over.

In both cases, review is a necessary part of the repetition. If you don’t call your dog for a year, what are the chances that he will come immediately when you do? If you haven’t used your Spanish verbs in a long time and you go to a Spanish-speaking country for a trip, they are unlikely to be right at the tip of your tongue. [click to continue…]

When I wrote about Learning Spanish Like Crazy recently, I didn’t realize it is also for sale at Amazon.  That link takes you to what I said then. Here’s what is up at Amazon.

By the way, I am not much of a fan of the FSI remastered programs that are mentioned here as bonuses. They are half a century out of date and not nearly as interesting as things done more recently. (By, the way, I know the text below isn’t playing nice with the margins of the page. It’s on my short list of things to figure out.)

Overall Rating:

 

Total Customer Reviews: (36)

Seller: Amazon

Learning Spanish Like Crazy was developed to teach conversational Latin American Spanish. The course was developed after the Founder of the course realized that the Spanish that Latin American actually speak was different from the Spanish that he had learned from other self-study Spanish courses. Unlike many other Spanish courses, Learning Spanish [Read More...]

I’ve been reflecting lately on how effective any of these learn-Spanish programs and websites are for average users. I’ll get to why I have been considering this a bit further down the page.

From what I observe, people  tend to lead rather hectic lives. This includes so-called “retired” people. It is easy to be scattered. And this makes it less likely that people will do their Spanish lessons as much as they thought they would.

I admit that I have always been an incorrigible  optimist about how much I could do in a given amount of time, and as a result I am always juggling too much. Because I’ve been like this at least since high school, I’ve had a lifelong interest in time management. I have taught private classes and workshops for corporations on the subject. I use lists and prioritizing every day — even on my days off! (My husband thinks I am nuts, but that is another matter!)

So if you were to ask me about the average user of  Rocket Spanish, Fluenz Spanish, Rosetta Stone, other programs, or the various websites I’ve reviewed. How much do I think they learn? I would say, I doubt they learn much. [click to continue…]

Fluenz Spanish has recently updated its course. Version F2 has some updates, and now they also offer Spanish Part 3 along with 1 and 2. (If you only want Parts 1 and 2, you can get them without 3.)

Here it is at Amazon, where the prices are better than anywhere else I have seen.

I’m using a new piece of software that enables me to pull Amazon product posts into my blog…. one thing I like about it is that I can include some of the user reviews this way. Scroll down and see what they say. Fluenz Spanish continues to be my very favorite program for multi-media learning. But now you can see easily that I’m not alone in this opinion!

[click to continue…]