I’ve just been browsing around a Website which describes itself in this way: “Open Culture brings together high-quality cultural & educational media for the worldwide lifelong learning community.”

Well, fine, but how do they choose things? While they probably have a variety of criteria, I was reassured when I read the list of people who work on the site. They have impressive credentials. For example, the lead editor is a man named Dan Colman who is the Director of Stanford’s Continuing Studies Program. Open Culture is not part of Stanford, but still reading this made me confident that things I would find there would be good quality. Click to read more >>>

I was looking for something else on Squidoo right now when I happened to come across a page (or a lens, in the language used at Squidoo) about how to learn Spanish for free.

Well, that’s always one of my themes here, all the more so these days. So here is the url: Click to read more >>>

My email recently has brought me these two sites for learning some Spanish free.

Learn Spanish with Comics has a bunch of short comics on the pages, with the text in Spanish. You can click on the speech bubble to see the translation into English. Click to read more >>>

Want to get one or two Spanish lesson audiobooks for free? I was poking around Amazon.com just now, curious to find out what their bestselling audiobooks for learning Spanish were. It’s not the easiest thing in the world to track down bestsellers at Amazon, but eventually I did. As ever with a list, a few of the titles were not exactly on topic but most of them were.

So here’s the list of  bestselling audiobooks for learning Spanish. The link takes you to Amazon. So what about the free part? Click to read more >>>

A couple of years ago I blogged about Spanishdict.com as a way to learn Spanish online free. Well, now they have come up with a really nice feature, a video dictionary for over 5,000 words in Spanish. Here is a sample entry, with a 15-second video as well as all the written translation and meanings you would expect in a dictionary. This is one for the verb acomodar:

http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/acomodar#

I have just been playing around with this dictionary. I tried chingar, an impolite verb widely used in Mexico. There wasn’t a video for it — no surprise there — but there was a print entry. And every entry in their dictionary has the audio for both the Spanish and the English. Click to read more >>>

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 read more >>>