Tips, Proven Techniques, and Reviews

Supposing you are at an intermediate level of Spanish and you want to learn more. What do you do?

This is a question that several people have asked me recently.

It’s not an easy one to answer because intermediate means different things to different people.

• If Mary is intermediate, she may have a good grounding in pronunciation and comprehension of spoken Spanish.
• Bob, who is also at an intermediate level, can’t pronounce or understand spoken Spanish nearly as well, but he has an excellent grounding in grammar, verb tenses, and the ability to read.
• Two other people who call themselves intermediate will have slightly different skills.

It’s not like they were all in high school or college classes together and are all ready for the same new material!

One good way to work on your Spanish online free is to go to a website I have used and have blogged about before. The University of Texas at Austin has a website with Spanish Proficiency Exercises you can work through. They will give you exposure to a broad variety of accents. Check them out. They are also good as an add-on to a more structured program.

My two favorite programs for beginners have added intermediate modules in the past year or two. There is a list here that tells you what is in the different modules of Fluenz Spanish — scroll down a little on that page to see it.

And here is a link to the intermediate version of Rocket Spanish.

These two programs may or may not match your own intermediate needs, but both come with a money-back guarantee. Still, it’s best to go for a good fit the first time.

Ask yourself what you want to learn next, and that will help you decide how to do it.

And if you have experienced this situation yourself, do add some comments about what you did and how well it worked for you!

Recently I’ve taken a few articles of mine about learning Spanish and put them on document-sharing sites. I did them as PDF files, and you are welcome to download any of them to keep yourself or to give to anyone you want to.  They can also be embedded in any website.

I’m experimenting with new ways of encouraging people to learn to speak Spanish! (Some of these articles have already appeared on this blog but not all.) If you aren’t familiar with document-sharing sites, they are places that people can post articles, books, powerpoint presentations, etc… kind of like a YouTube for this kind of material. There doesn’t seem to be one site that stands out like YouTube does for video, so I am trying several places.

Here are links to some of the articles I have posted on these sites. On each site, if you look on the right-hand side, there should be a list of everything I have uploaded to the site.  Since there are several, I have made the links so they open in a new browser window or tab:

At Calameo:  Why You Won’t Learn to Speak Spanish [click to continue…]

Fluenz Spanish is a program that I have a tremendous amount of respect for. I’ve written about it quite a lot on this website and blog… my main review of Fluenz Spanish is here. I really like their commitment to language learning.

So I was quite interested to read an article about the company, Fluenz Hopes to Help Users to Fluency, in the Wall Street Journal recently. It tells about how the company got started and what its goals are. [click to continue…]

Tagged as: Fluenz Spanish

I was poking around Amazon the other day, curious what odd things I might find related to learning Spanish. The oddest was a mug that said enigmatically, “Save the Planet. Learn Spanish.” I didn’t bother linking to that, but here is something else I hadn’t known about: [click to continue…]

I came across this article recently and even though by February a lot of resolutions have gone by the wayside, I feel that one of the most useful things I can do with this blog is help you think about how to get going, keep going, and make satisfying progress in learning Spanish. Hope you pick up an idea or two from it; used by permission. (I am not familiar with her particular approach.) — Rosana

How to Plan Your Language Learning in 2010

By Martina Srblin

With 2010 well under way, it’s time to come up with your language learning plan for the year. It doesn’t need to be particularly elaborate, but you definitely need one if you want to stay on track and wrap up 2010 with great results.

Basically, what will benefit you most is a flexible language learning plan that will provide a detailed-enough answers to these 4 basic questions: [click to continue…]

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