Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog » learn spanish free

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.

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.

Destinos: A Free Online Spanish Course

Rosana — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:34:00 +0000

Destinos is a telenovela, or Spanish soap opera, with a difference. It’s probably not as corny as most that I have seen on Mexican television because it was created to teach speaking, listening, and comprehension skills in Spanish. Produced by WGBH, the public broadcasting station in Boston, in 1992, it can be watched for free online or purchased as DVDs. You can also download some supplementary materials to your computer at no charge.

Here is how the program is described on its website.

This telenovela, or Spanish soap opera, immerses students in everyday situations with native speakers and introduces the cultures, accents, and dialects of Mexico, Spain, Argentina, and Puerto Rico. Understanding of Spanish and appreciation of many Hispanic cultures increase as students become absorbed in the mysterious and entertaining story.

Closed captioning in Spanish can be used as a teaching and literacy resource. The series is also appropriate for teacher professional development.

With 52 programs in the series, I am sure you can learn a lot. I have seen favorable comments about this course at various language-learning forums around the internet.

Here is the page where they describe the Destinos course. Just to give you the flavor, here are the first five lesson descriptions of the 52 given on that page.

1. Unit I
Vocabulario: cognates; family members.
Gramática: ser; articles and gender, possession.

2. Unit I
Vocabulario: cognates; family members.
Gramática: ser; articles and gender, possession.

3. Unit II: Un viaje a Sevilla, España
Vocabulario: numbers (0-21); academic subjects; animals, days of the week; telling time.
Gramática: hay; estar; ir; present tense (regular verbs); subject pronouns; personal a; interrogatives; adjectives.

4. Unit II: Un viaje a Sevilla, España
Vocabulario: numbers (0-21); academic subjects; animals, days of the week; telling time.
Gramática: hay; estar; ir; present tense (regular verbs); subject pronouns; personal a; interrogatives; adjectives.

5. Unit II: Un viaje a Sevilla, España
Vocabulario: numbers (0-21); academic subjects; animals, days of the week; telling time.
Gramática: hay; estar; ir; present tense (regular verbs); subject pronouns; personal a; interrogatives; adjectives.

To watch the programs, you need to stream the videos, which means you have to have a fast enough connection. They say, “To hear the sound and view video, you should have Windows Media Player, DSL, a cable modem, or a LAN connection to a T1 line or greater, and have Javascript enabled.” So evidently it doesn’t work for the Mac.

You also need to sign up, which is free and can be done here. Looks like you are expected to be in the US. I didn’t try it to see if it would accept my Colorado address even though I am in Mexico with a a Mexican internet connection. (And that is why I didn’t try out the program… doubt that my connection could handle it.)

If you listen to some or all of these, do come back and give us a report on how you liked it! I have been keeping my eye out for free online Spanish courses of truly good quality, and this may be one.

Destinos: A Free Online Spanish Course is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.

Learn Spanish for Free – with RSS

Rosana — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:45:29 +0000

RSS doesn’t stand for Really Super Spanish, though it’s always a good idea to have that as your goal. RSS is an internet term, usually described as a shortcut for Really Simple Syndication. But this is a blog on learning Spanish, so why am I talking about RSS?

By using RSS and an online reader – I’ll be demonstrating with Google Reader, my favorite – you can keep up to date way more easily with your favorite online blogs, for learning Spanish or for whatever else interests you. In this article, first I will try to entice you into wanting to use RSS and then I’ll tell you how.

I am still keeping my eye out for a free learn-Spanish program or website that is anywhere near the quality of Fluenz Spanish, Rocket Spanish, or Pimsleur . (Those links take you to my reviews on this website.) So far, no luck, but I will keep looking. But I have found several ways to learn Spanish online free, which you could use as add-ons to whatever program you work with. Since I’m already at home enough with the language, I just use these and pop some of the words and phrases into my flashcard software.

Here are some that I have subscribed to via RSS:

Spanish NewsBites (the small RSS symbol is down the page, on the left)
Spanish on About.com (also a small RSS symbol, at the bottom right of the page)
Learn Spanish Rapidly (yep, that’s where you are right now, and my RSS symbol is on the top left)

I subscribe to several more but you get the idea. If you have signed up for my free ebook on how to learn Spanish and my Tuesday morning email newsletters, if you find you like RSS better than the newsletters, you can just unsubscribe from my newsletter using the link at the bottom of each issue.

How to Get Going with RSS

[1] Go to a blog you like and look for the RSS symbol. It’s most commonly orange but can be any color. Here it is on the top right corner of this blog

And sometimes there is no image, just the words RSS Feed or even just RSS.

[2] Click on the symbol or the words next to it.. Then you may see something like this:

or you might see a page with something like this as part of it:

In any case, whatever form it takes, you are asked what RSS reader you want to use. I’ve used the Bloglines and the MyYahoo ones in the past, but lately I’m happy with the Google Reader.

[3] So choose whatever reader you want to use. If you use gmail as I do, you already have a Google account. If you don’t use any of the online Google services that require an account, I imagine you would be taken to a page to sign up. So let’s say that you have done that or have a gmail account. Then after you click on “Subscribe Now” you may be asked if you want to put the RSS feed on your Google homepage or Google Reader.

[4] Click on Google Reader and you will be taken to your own Google Reader page. Here is what the top of mine looks like right now:

I know you can’t see it all that clearly at this size, but I just want to point out that on the left you will see a list of blogs you have signed up for. I have organized mine so that all the learn Spanish blogs are together under the heading Spanish. There is the number (15) after the word Spanish, and that indicates that 15 new blog posts have gone online since the last time I caught up in the reader.

[5] Using the Reader: On the right, you see that some of the article titles in the list are bold. That’s because I haven’t read them yet. Just after the title you can read the first few lines of the article. Then if you are interested, you can either click on the title to read the rest of the article in the Reader or you can click on the tiny arrow on the far right of the line and the whole article will open in a new tab or window.

Some websites have their RSS feeds set up so you can only read part of the article in the Reader and need to click on that tiny arrow to see it all.

If you liked this article, please post a comment below! I could do one on Twitter for sure and maybe some of the other ways that people connect, like the learn Spanish groups on Facebook. But now, it’s time to go try out a new piece of slang on a Mexican friend!

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

Spanishdict.com, A Free Online Resource to Learn Spanish

Rosana — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 20:29:00 +0000

I was happy to receive an email from Paralee Whitmire, who had come across my website and wanted to let me know about the lessons for learning Spanish and English that she has created at Spanishdict.com/learn. So I just went and took a look. In a nutshell, the website has a bunch of useful tools including her lessons.

I started with the homepage of the whole site. There are two boxes you can use for translating individual words and sentences. There is a section labeled "learn Spanish for free." That must be Paralee’s part, I thought. The bottom row here offers you a Spanish word of the day and there are some widgets you can install and a blog.

You can click on this image of the homepage to go to the website; it will open in a new tab or window.

I like the way that top line works as a translator. You can just start typing in any word in English or Spanish, without indicating which language you want translated. Here, I chose the word hotel, and you can see how I could next click on the word I wanted translated:

This setup makes it quicker to use and thus more likely that we will use it!

Next, I went to the upper right corner of the page and registered for the site. That’s free. The screen immediately opened into the lessons section. To give you the idea, here is the list of beginners’ lessons:

I decided to take a look at lesson 1.6, and here you see Paralee Whitmire doing a nice job of explaining the verb gustar.

I went on to the next list:

I’ve been working on improving my mastery of past tenses, so I started up Lesson 2.6. There was a video to watch, in which Paralee Whitmire explained the preterit tense. Here’s one sample screenshot from the video:

Now there are different philosophies about how to learn a foreign language, and I greatly prefer the approach of learning new things in context rather than by studying grammar. There is also research evidence that contextual method learning sticks in our brains better.

Spanishdict partly does that, as in the screenshot, but it also uses traditional verb conjugation charts. There were places where the emphasis on how to create verb forms — explaining the building blocks of the language – was not my cup of tea. To be told that to use an –ar verb in the preterit you drop the ar and add certain other endings is something I want to know *after* I have practiced a conversation and have it down pat.

So our philosophies diverged here. I think Rocket Spanish and Fluenz Spanish do a better job with teaching in context – those links take you to my reviews – BUT hey, Spanishdict is a website where you can start to learn Spanish free online, and those two are programs you purchase. And I DID learn a couple of things about the preterit from watching the video and doing the subsequent flashcards and other exercises. Each lesson is set up so you earn points by doing the different things.

Given this difference in approaches to learning, my final assessment is that this website is very nice for the dictionary, the word of the day, the lessons, and perhaps the forums which I didn’t spend much time in… but the lessons are best in my eyes if you want to review grammar. OR if you are someone who likes to learn the grammar right away. A woman asked me the other day what program I would recommend for her. She said that she really likes to learn grammar as she goes. For her this would be a good place to explore. Would it be for you? It will cost you nothing to try it out. And if you do, come back here and add a comment about your experiences!

Spanishdict.com, A Free Online Resource to Learn Spanish is a post from: Learn Spanish Rapidly: The Blog.