Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog » Learn Spanish Online Free

Here’s a List of 6 Free Resources for Learning Spanish

Rosana — Sat, 12 Nov 2011 00:54:50 +0000

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:

http://www.squidoo.com/learnspanishforfreenow

The list includes some things I have written about and some other good things. It starts out with BBC Spanish, which I recognized as Mi Vida Loca. had trouble downloading it from Mexico but it might work better now. Anyway, you can see what this fellow has to say on his page… err lens.

BBC Spanish

BBC Spanish is probably the best free way to learn Spanish out there.

In fact, from what I found, it’s actually better than most paid software applications!

From www.squidoo.com (share this quote)

Here’s a List of 6 Free Resources for Learning Spanish is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Two Free Sites for Learning Spanish: Conversation and Comic Books

Rosana — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 22:15:05 +0000

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.

The page you come to from that link just has one example. Clicking on “Click to view” is necessary to see all the pages. Looks like fun.

If you read and write good enough Spanish, the webmaster wants volunteers to help with the project.

I didn’t check out the email course.

The other site is called Verbling and seems to be just for English and Spanish speakers so far, with plans to add more languages later. It’s a language exchange (“intercambio” in Spanish) site, using live video. Evidently they have more native Spanish-speakers than native English-speakers signed up so far, so it’s a good time to try it.

You sign up and get paired up with a native Spanish speaker. The two of you speak one language for five minutes and then the other, and then you go to someone else.

Most of the people shown look waaay younger than me, which could be fun too. I admit I haven’t tried it. If you do, please come back and post a comment about your experiences!

Two Free Sites for Learning Spanish: Conversation and Comic Books is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Bestselling Audiobooks for Learning Spanish, Get One Free

Rosana — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:11:19 +0000

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?

You can buy them there or you can get a free 30-day trial via Amazon at a site that has audiobooks. It appears that you can get one of these audiobooks free, plus another of your choosing, if you try the program. I suggest you mark you calendar for about three weeks from when you sign up, so you have time to decide if you want to continue or not!

Listening to Spanish is a really, really good way to learn to understand it better. I have done that a lot. Sometimes I’ve even dreamed in a better Spanish than I can speak! Or so it seemed… there is no objective way to prove that.

If you do try this out, I’d love it if you would come back here and report on your experience!

Bestselling Audiobooks for Learning Spanish, Get One Free is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

A Free Online Spanish Video Dictionary

Rosana — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 16:09:53 +0000

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.I tried putting in the English word raccoon, and the translation (el mapache) came up in dictionary format. Okay, those words are not really among the most important five thousand to learn. Then I typed in the verb dar, which means to give, and sure enough there was another video, about the same length as the first one. I liked that the sample sentence was in the past tense. Below the video there was lots of useful text entry, including a large number of sayings that use the verb dar and a conjugation chart.

Very handy! I have bookmarked http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/

… and I suggest that you do too! With money tight for many, I imagine that free resources like this are getting more business. They certainly provide a good service!

A Free Online Spanish Video Dictionary is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Learn Spanish for Free

Rosana — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:28:06 +0000

I like to feature a variety of ways to learn Spanish, both the programs or sites that cost money and those that don’t. Especially now that there are many people who have to watch their money more carefully but may have time on their hands… time that can be spent in part learning some Spanish.

Here is a list of the articles I have written for this blog and put into the category “Learn Spanish Online Free.” Take a look…

To see a list of these articles (and any more that I may have written since, if you come upon this article later, go to my page in this blog at http://www.learnspanishrapidly.com/blog/category/learn-spanish-online-free/ where you can read the start of each article and then decide to click through or not.

Learn Spanish for Free is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

New Year’s Resolution to Learn Spanish?

Rosana — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:51:45 +0000

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. I blogged about why and our future plans here, on my site about Mexico. In the spring we’ll be returning to the small town in Colorado where we used to live, using that as our home base, and I always have plenty of chance to speak Spanish there, whether with the tamale lady who sells from her car near the post office or just around town. And we don’t expect to stay full time there, so likely will be back in Mexico.

But with all this going on (driving from Guadalajara with two cats and two dogs, for example) I may be a little erratic at times in keeping up here.

Here’s a website I just came across that has a nice-looking list of free Spanish lessons:

http://www.openculture.com/free_spanish_lessons

So that might help too.

New Year’s Resolution to Learn Spanish? is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

SpanishDict is Back

Rosana — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:57:42 +0000

In January I blogged about SpanishDict, a popular free online resource for learning Spanish. Over the next few months, readers posted comments that the site was down (and that they missed it). Well, I am happy to report that SpanishDict did a major relaunch a couple of months ago.

You can find it at http://www.spanishdict.com/

I got an email from someone there, who said:

SpanishDict is a Spanish education website that, in addition to its popular Spanish-English dictionary and translation, offers lots of other Spanish learning materials for free. Currently, we bring over 3 million people to our site every month, and with so many people trying to learn Spanish in our country, we hope to bring millions more.

Welcome back, SpanishDict! I see from browsing their blog that they offer fast translations to mobile phones and much more.

Here is a screenshot of their homepage. You can translate words or phrases, learn lessons with videos, do flashcards, and learn the word of the day. Clicking on the image takes you there.

SpanishDict is Back is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Professor Jason Teaches Spanish on YouTube

Rosana — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:16:00 +0000

One of my readers emailed me that she liked Professor Jason on YouTube, so I took a look. He has done quite a few videos – free, of course.

Here is one with basic greetings:

And here is the link to all his videos on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/languagenow

Watch out for the Portuguese on that page. When I was there, I had to scroll down a little to see all the Spanish videos.

Professor Jason actually is a professor – he teaches Spanish at Penn State University.

Professor Jason Teaches Spanish on YouTube is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Want to Communicate Online Free with Someone Who Speaks Spanish?

Rosana — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 21:54:00 +0000

I’ve just been looking around My Happy Planet and it seems like a potentially useful tool for learning to write Spanish via language exchange. I wouldn’t recommend such an approach for a total beginner, but for anyone who already knows some Spanish, this could be a nice add-on to a course or other more organized way of learning Spanish.

Here is how they describe their site:

MyHappyPlanet is the home for people learning languages:

* Send and receive messages with native speakers around the world.
* Learn about cultures and languages through lessons created by our members.
* Watch videos uploaded by our members in multiple languages.

I didn’t actually sign up for My Happy Planet, since I live in Mexico and am always chatting with people in my town. But without signing up, you can still get a pretty good sense of what goes on there. People describe what languages they speak and what they are learning, and say a little about themselves, often with a photo.

They give their Skype, MSN Messenger, and Yahoo Messenger IDs, though without signing up, I couldn’t see those. So you could do instant messaging with them, and maybe actual conversation – wasn’t sure about that.

Just for fun, I did a search for people who speak Spanish and want to learn English. You can choose the age range, and 36+ was the oldest. I chose that and saw several people who sounded like they would be interesting to communicate with.

The site tells you how recently the person was online, and how many other people they are helping. If the person has indicated, it says what country they live in, and the town as well.

How I love the ways the internet brings people together! That makes for a happy planet all right.

Want to Communicate Online Free with Someone Who Speaks Spanish? is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Livemocha: An Online Language-Learning Community

Rosana — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:21:00 +0000

I read someone’s opinion someplace online that the website Livemocha was like Rosetta Stone, only better. So I decided to check out Livemocha, specially since it has a large free part.

Now Rosetta Stone doesn’t suit my learning style, plus theoretically I think it’s not the best approach to learning languages… here’s my Rosetta Stone review. So with a bias against the program, off I went to poke around Livemocha.

It was evident right away that this was far more than just a bunch of lessons. It’s a very social, interactive place. I believe that there are quite a few of these interactive language places around the net, but this is the only one I have tried so far.

I went to Livemocha just before I got a nice new desktop computer with great sound capabilities, and unfortunately my old laptop wasn’t up to all the multimedia aspects of Livemocha. Its sound card didn’t work well enough for me to use the pronunciation feature, but still I did do one of the lessons. It was rather like Rosetta Stone, in using images and words. So if you are considering Rosetta Stone, you might try this first.

Here is what Livemocha says you can do there:

Enroll in Courses: With our fun and holistic online language courses you’ll develop all the skills and confidence to begin conversing with native speakers.

Make Friends: The Livemocha community is full of friendly, like-minded, and motivated language learners looking to practice their skills. Don’t be shy – introduce yourself and start practicing!

Receive Tips from Native Speakers: Have your speaking and writing submissions reviewed and scored by native speakers. They will rate their proficiency, give you tips for improvement, and help you meet your language-learning goals.

Stay Motivated: Learning a new language is tough! Track your weekly goals, earn points for completing exercises, and compare your progress with that of your friends for some friendly competition.

If an online language-learning community, for Spanish and many other languages, sounds like fun, take a look at Livemocha.

Livemocha: An Online Language-Learning Community is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.