Who am I to be telling you how to learn Spanish?
I’ve learned my Spanish in a variety of ways, and noticed that some worked better than others. This sparked my curiosity and I have done a good bit of research on how to learn languages.
Here are some pertinent bits of my life:
I studied French in high school and college and even lived in France for a while, but though I could read and write French well, I never got over my self-consciousness about speaking it.
Later I went to Spain and lived in a town on the Mediterranean for a year. I had taken one semester of college Spanish in preparation for this adventure, but what really got my spoken Spanish going was taking private lessons from a young woman in the town. AND the Spanish were so much nicer about my attempts at speaking their language than the French had been!
Later, I got a Master’s of Library Science and worked in public libraries. There I learned how to evaluate books and media for how effective they were.
After some years of library work, I became a certified hypnotherapist and specialized in teaching self-hypnosis classes. What I learned about how our minds work is often used in this website on learning Spanish.
Eventually I settled into my current and probably last career, as a writer. My husband and I have traveled in Mexico a lot, including several long trips, and I have a website, www.mexico-with-heart.com, which talks about that. It also has a blog chronicling our life in Mexico… we’ve spent most of our time here for several years now.
My own Spanish has gotten a lot better here, but I’ve been startled by how many other American and Canadian residents of Mexico speak almost NO Spanish. So I started www.learnspanishrapidly.com partly to help them and partly to get my own Spanish to higher levels.
That may be more than you wanted to know about me… after all, the website is about learning Spanish… but I do like to overcome the impersonality of the internet.
