The author, Claire Handscome, has taught Spanish and French as a tutor, so she provides a different point of view than I do. She’s British and writing for a British audience so there are some references to O levels and other aspects of the British education system that I just ignored. I did enjoy her dry British humor!

The book’s strengths are in motivation, in mentioning a variety of websites, and in giving a more favorable view of classes than I do!

Conquering Babel: An Enjoyable Short Read is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

I didn’t take it for a spin myself but I looked around the site and it looks good. He has quite a few happy customers.

Scott said in an email to me that his course involves listening, watching, and doing, and that he thinks the doing part is the strength of his course.

So if you are looking for a basic course, you might like to give it a try. If you do, come back here and post your thoughts about it!

Here are some of the topics: parts of speech, introduction to spanish verbs, it’s all about usted, phrases and questions, present tense irregular yo, boot verbs, pronunciations, ser vs estar, articles, and more.

A New Website for Learning Spanish from a Reasonably Priced CD is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

This Blog Was Hacked, Is Fixed Now! is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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.

A Mexican friend of mine told me that she thinks getting estar and ser right is the hardest thing for non-native speakers learning Spanish. She gave as an example an Italian friend of hers who spoke perfect Spanish EXCEPT for mistakes confusing these two verbs.  (Italian is extremely close to Spanish… I can get the drift of Italian movies just from my Spanish.)

I’ve written once before about this: To Be or To Be? In Spanish, That’s the Question is a review of a very useful little book on the subject. Now, I’m going to provide you with some solid information from around the web. (This is going to be a format I’ll use more here. I will always provide links to what I quote…)

Ser and Estar Online

I sifted through a lot of pages to find a good one. One of the clearest explanations is at Spanishdict.com, a site I have blogged about before. On this subject, I liked their memory aid for ser:  DOCTOR stands for Description, Occupation, Characteristic, Time, Origin, and Relationship. Read the article for more.

Clipped from: www.spanishdict.com (share this clip)

A Video about These Two Verbs

Professor Jason has a lot of good videos for learning Spanish on YouTube. I blogged about him a couple of years ago. Here is his lesson on ser and estar:

I discovered that there are a lot of videos made by high school students on ser and estar but none that held my interest enough to share with you.

Estar and Ser: How to Use These Two Versions of To Be is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

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.

When the site loads, you’ll hear the voice of Dave Clark, who taught college-level Spanish. That led to his developing this program, as he explains in the brief video. Just underneath it is a red box offering free Spanish lessons. So of course I clicked on it.A new window opened, with the lesson you see part of below. (I made the image smaller to fit in my blog.)

The red outline draws your attention to the section being taught at the moment. This screenshot only shows part of the screen. A native English speaker says words in English, and then a native Spanish speaker says the words that mean the same thing in Spanish. There is plenty of time for you to repeat the Spanish. Here, the sentence being demonstrated is “I need to go to the park.”

One thing I liked right away was that if I knew what was being said, my eyes could roam over the whole page and I might spot something new to learn. This gave the program a nice flexibility.

As they tell you on the screen, this kind of lesson is called a Listen & Repeat. Roughly 1/5 of the over 500 lessons are this sort. As it tells you, these lessons teach you vocabulary and how to build hundreds of combinations of sentences in 13 major topics.

I went to the next activity, called a virtual instructor, and it was followed by a memory machine. Next came a software tour, and then a video on how it works. This explains that the visual images are linked in your brain to the Spanish words you learn. They have found that words linked to moving images are particularly well retained.

I was fascinated when the video explained the three different learning styles that we humans have, and that each of us has a primary and a secondary style. I had learned this in grad school, and was pleased to see it applied here.

Looks like a good program! There are 11 free lessons. Find out more by clicking on the image:

Visual Link Spanish: My First Impressions is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Venezuela... Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday I had the chance to chat with a woman from Venezuela who lives part of the year in our little town in Colorado. The moment she realized that I had lived in Mexico, she started speaking Spanish and of course I followed. I immediately admitted that while my pronunciation is far from perfect, I do love to speak Spanish.

Latin American Spanish has many forms, though, and I soon realized that she was dropping the ends of some of her words and doing other things that seemed strange to my ears, being used to Mexican Spanish.

I had no trouble understanding her. When English speakers learn Spanish, we tend to learn either Spanish as spoken in Spain, or a generic Latin American version. But just as we can understand people from England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand — sometimes with a few laughs and misunderstandings — chances are that whatever version of Spanish you learn originally will enable you to converse in any country in the Spanish-speaking world. It may take some adjusting at first, admittedly.

This topic came up again today, when a friend came over for lunch. He learned his Spanish mostly in Denver, going to parties and events designed for getting native speakers and learners together. “I find the Mexican accent the hardest,” he admitted. I don’t even notice it!

Well, I got curious and did a bit of websurfing. Here are a couple of articles on Latin American Spanish:

http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/latin_american_spanish.htm

This one describes many different regions and what the Spanish is like there.

And here’s another: http://www.spanish.bz/dialects.htm

I enjoyed them both.

Latin American Spanish Has Many Variations is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Since we came back a year ago from five years’ living in Mexico, I have been caught up in the English-speaking world where I live… fixing up our new house, serving on the library board, and doing a lot of writing for my other websites. I’ve been remiss here because adding Spanish language practice to everything else was just a bit much.

Puerto Vallarta at night. Image via Wikipedia

My husband has been much more active in using his Spanish. It helped that he spent a couple of weeks in Puerto Vallarta in January. Basking in the sun with a margarita at hand? Nope. He was teaching earthbag building to a group of Mexicans, mostly in Spanish! (The link goes to a blog post I did about that on another blog of mine.) And just today he mentioned that he is having a long email correspondence in Spanish with a Mexican man who has been doing earthbag building around Oaxaca someplace.

So he’s had a reason to use his Spanish and I have scarcely thought in it for ages.

Till last week, as I said.

We were out doing errands in another town and we came home a different way. That route took us past a Mexican restaurant we used to go to several years ago. Would it still be there? We stopped in, plenty hungry. Luckily it was still there, with the same varied buffet of all kinds of delicious smelling things. I even know the names in Spanish of many of the dishes!

As we came in, a Mexican-looking woman smiled and waved at us. We recognized her as someone we had known casually for many years. She hadn’t seen us since we got back from Mexico, and it was possibly even more delicious than the food to be greeted in that warm, effusive Mexican way!

We went through the buffet and joined her and a friend she was with. We chatted away in Spanish and English. She is American, of a large family from the Monterrey area of Mexico. Spanish was her first language, and as she saw that we could follow her, she went faster and faster. But soon she and her friend left, on their way to do a bunch of errands themselves.

Our Spanish didn’t stop there. I chatted with the waitress at length. It was such fun that my motivation for learning Spanish has definitely gone up a notch!

So if you have times when your motivation drops, it’s natural. Just try to find something fun to do where you can speak a little Spanish with native speakers, and see what it does for you!

Learning Spanish When Motivation is Weak is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

The Verbarrator, for Windows and Mac, is the brainchild of Patrick Jackson, an American who lives in Colombia and devotes himself to helping other English-speakers learn to speak Spanish. He has another program, Learning Spanish LIke Crazy, which I have blogged about before and will review later.

Click on that link to go to his website, where you can download a free demo copy and try it for yourself!

Here  is a screenshot I took of the demo version. It doesn’t take long to get the hang of using this program! As you can see, you can choose various kinds of verbs, or specific verbs from the list on the left, and have them in a queue for you to use. I like it that one of the choices on the left is “My custom list.”

On the right, you can choose which verb tenses you want to practice with. I had checked a few right before I took the screeenshot.

In the middle, you have the verb player and I will put a couple of screenshots further down the page.

Very cool, I think. Learning verbs is so crucial to speaking Spanish well, and this device can help you master verbs waaay more easily than textbooks!

So here are some shots of the VERB Player in the middle of the Verbarrator. When I took them, the phrases given were being pronounced:

So it tells you which verb tense you are practicing and you can see which person. It goes through them all. Here is the same verb tense for “you:”

And here is one for another verb tense:

To find out more,

Click Here to go to the Verbarrator website and see what you think!

The Verbarrator is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.