Tips, Proven Techniques, and Reviews

As a former librarian in public libraries, I have to admit that I am a big fan of the “For Dummies” books. They have a level of quality control that means you can trust them to be quite good, with very few exceptions in their hundreds (or is it now thousands?) of published books.

So I went to Amazon and did a search on Spanish for Dummies. Not surprisingly, readers generally like it though many of them point out that no one book is going to do everything for you. There are complaints about typos and the like, but I will spare you my librarianly rant on the lower standards of book publishing these days! [click to continue…]

Can you teach yourself Spanish? I think so. Of course, you can’t teach yourself anything you don’t know without some form of help. But what I mean here is that you can learn a lot of Spanish on your own, without formal classes, by using Spanish language software, sound files, websites, etc. You do have to motivated enough, and persistent enough, to keep going on your own.

Is teaching yourself the best way to learn Spanish? Well, opinions are going to differ on that one, and I would have to say that it depends on various factors in your situation. [click to continue…]

How’s your memory? Most people over 50 or even younger groan when asked that question. But memory is of course essential in learning Spanish, learning any language, or learning anything.

I remember noticing in high school and college that my memory operated a bit differently from that of many of my friends. I was able to pick things up quickly — which was great back then for not having to study much — but I also forgot them more easily.

Now I understand why, and it’s a key for you as well in learning Spanish: review is essential for things to become lodged in our long-term memories. I have blogged about this before and no doubt I will again because it’s really important. It’s one reason I recommend using a program for learning Spanish, instead of a little bit of this or that here and there. All good programs have the review process embedded in their schedules. [click to continue…]

In the research I did before I began this site, I came across a variety of theories about how adults best learn languages. In my free ebook Five Keys to Learning Spanish Rapidly (that link takes you to my page about it), I touch briefly on what I learned, but I have been meaning to blog more fully about what works and what doesn’t.

Think of how young children learn their native tongue. They hear its rhythms and cadences from infancy. People speak to them from practically the minute they are born. By the time they start speaking, they have already been immersed in the language.

Not surprisingly, there are theories of learning a second language that attempt to mimic this immersion process. Before I began work on this website, I assumed that an immersion-style approach would be the most effective.

Not so.

More recent research has proven that adults and teenagers do not utilize the same methods. Around the time of puberty, when so many changes are happening in the body and brain, the capacity to absorb languages like a sponge diminishes. Instead, teens and adults do best at learning languages when they still have a lot of exposure to the language they are learning but when they also use their ability to draw conclusions based on experience. (No cracks about teenagers, please!)

So if your first language is English and you begin learning Spanish as a teen or adult, your learning process will do well if you get some explanations in English about what you are learning in Spanish. Your brain can easily process a remark, for example, about how the two Spanish verbs ser and estar both translate into English as “to be” and what each one is used for. You may then spend years getting it right if you are like me, but my point is that explanations in English can be very useful.

Recently I was looking around Amazon to see what their best-selling books were for learning Spanish.  I navigated the reference books section to the category Words & Language, and then to Linguistics.

Looking down the list for books in Spanish, the first two books I found were really cheap and could be useful. The first one got a lot of five-star reviews from readers, the second one a bit less.

[1] I remember this Dover book from when I was a librarian. At two dollars, a bargain… and a lot of vendors are selling copies for one penny (but they usually make up for it with higher shipping). [click to continue…]

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.  Here’s the list of what’s in all five levels of Fluenz Spanish.

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…]