Learning Spanish

[PolymerSkywalker]

We have a growing Spanish speaking population in my little town, so I think it’s about time I learn the language. Any recommendations as to the best way to get proficient at simple conversational Spanish? Do the apps and online classes work?

 

[NYCgrrl]

Babel has a free site that’s pretty good.

 

[OneOftheB's]

My daughter’s school suggested Duolingo as a brush up on conversational Spanish prior to the capstone trip to Spain where they stayed in home where only Spanish was spoken, took classes and spoke to a class of Spanish kids.

 

[texaslover]

I'm an ESL teacher/coach with a high population of Spanish speakers. I do the free Duolingo and find it helpful. Of course, just day to day conversation and the repetition of listening and interpreting and then attempting to contribute in Spanish seems to stick more in my head but there has to be some foundation for that so I do my daily lessons. I also ask my kids how to say sentences correctly or how to say a particular word in Spanish all the time and those interactions do cement my learning.

 

[BaymaxForever]

Dreaming Spanish has worked great for me. It uses comprensible input as a method to learn a language. You watch videos from super-beginner level (which I was) on up to advanced from a variety of teachers on different topics. The website tracks your progress/minutes watched. I watched everything for free for a long time until I ran out of free ones and now pay $8 a month for the premium content. It’s the only thing I pay for. I’ve been doing that for a a year and a half and I can actually understand a lot of Spanish, from native speakers to tv to radio and actually understand what they are saying, or at least get the gist of it.
I also do a Duolingo lesson everyday, mainly just for the ‘streak’ and accountability. I’ve done that for two years, but consider dreaming Spanish my main ‘teacher.’

 

[DodgerGirl]

When I was a little girl my mother had always wanted to teach me Spanish because my grandmother had always wanted to hear me speak Spanish and I wasn't sure I'd like learning Spanish so my mother bought some Spanish lesson computer games to teach me and we had a dozen of those games and it did help me a lot and by the time I mastered Spanish my grandmother was proud of me when I talked to her on the phone in Spanish. I improved my Spanish by singing along to music videos of Mexican music and it was so cool. I would have to say that if you have to learn any language Spanish is the one to start with because it looks pretty easy to master and you can buy a good Spanish lesson program to get started on learning Spanish in easy steps

 

[NYCgrrl]

I would have to say that if you have to learn any language Spanish is the one to start with because it looks pretty easy to master

Agreed. It is one of the easiest languages for English speakers to learn in part because “what you see is what you get”. No frustration over which way to pronounce words; learn the alphabet and you are pretty much done. Unlike French which is more like English with lots of memorization that really makes no modern day sense and just show the tangled linguistics (Which witch are we speaking of?) the language (English) is known for.

DGD opted to take Spanish in school although I would have advised French. Later she explained her reasoning and it made sense; she wanted to do a comparative study of the three languages.

 

[tvguy]

I took 5 1/2 years of High School level Spanish, 7th grade students took a semester of French and a semester of Spanish, and then you had the option of taking Freshman level Spanish in 8th grade, and an additional 4 years of Spanish once you got to High School. Spanish is commonly used here, but over 50 years I just never used it enough to keep up. I can understand somethings but have lost most of the vocabulary.
In College I took a month long trip to East and West Germany/Austria/Poland and our group met up with an International Businessman who asked why Americans bother learning a foreign language because, as he put it, we already spoke the International Language. He did business all over the Eastern Bloc including the Soviet Union and all his business was done in English.

 

[DodgerGirl]

I can say the hardest part of learning Spanish is mastering the Spanish language alphabet because when I had to practice Spanish when I would look at the alphabet in Spanish I find it odd that there are two r's and the other is a double r and the same thing with the letter N and they have N and the N that is pronounced like singer Enya's name and that is confusing to people. My mother had to practice her Spanish in preschool and she would tell me that learning the Spanish alphabet was difficult for her and she would always mispronounce the letters when she was little. But at least counting in Spanish is easy because you can easily count to ten in Spanish easily