Learn Spanish Online
This is the first language other than my native English that I studied and I have spent the longest amount of time studying it. Spanish is typically thought of as an easy foreign language to learn and increasingly useful throughout the United States. Spanish is the 2nd most widely spoken language by native speakers (according to a 1999 study – 2nd only to Chinese.) It is ranked third when second language speakers are taken into consideration (English is very popular as a second language internationally.)
One of the easy things about Spanish is the pronunciation rules are very straightforward. You can pretty well learn the pronunciation rules and then know how to pronounce new words very easily. Also, for the English speaker, there are a lot of similar root words from some of English’s Latin roots (thanks to William the Conqueror.)
Of course you’ll probably want to use some of the online radio and tv resources that I’ve compiled here to start off your listening for what the language sounds like and then revisit as you learn to practice and improve your listening skills. You might also find that speakers native to Spain tend to speak at a quicker pace than some of the other sources that I’ve linked to. (I find VOA News and Radio Netherlands rather leisurely compared to some of the “Spain”-based tv news networks.) Latin-American Spanish can be a bit slower paced than Iberian Spanish, but it depends on the subject matter, the speaker and the country. SO, the bottom line is, if you find one stream that just seems to fast, keep browsing.
Watch Spanish Language TV Online
Spanish Language On Demand Shortwave Radio News Online
Live Spanish Language Shortwave Radio Streams
There are some great online resources to get started at learning Spanish:
If the listing below is not enough you might visit my Learning Spanish page at my Study New Languages website.
BBC Learn Spanish – great resource from the BBC to help learn and improve your Spanish language skills.
Notes In Spanish downloadable mp3 podcasts at several levels with workbooks to help follow along and improve your skills.
About.com’s Spanish language resource area (this has a good newsletter that could be helpful among other things.)
Also, you can find the online Wordreference translation dictionary useful. I’ve added it’s search to my Firefox search box, you could also add it to internet explorer as a search provider there as well. They have several good features in addition to the translation dictionary, they do have a Spanish language only dictionary as well.
I have not used it myself, but have heard great things about Rocket Spanish.
I also receive a newsletter from Learning Spanish Like Crazy and have seen some very good samples of the audio programs they provide.
lomastv provides videos with slow play and english/spanish captions. It looks to be a fee involved to access the videos though.
Another great resource is FSI Language Courses, which are available for free at the link in this sentence. FSI-language-courses.com is an excellent resource for multiple languages, but the link provided goes to the Spanish page. These were produced by the U.S. government and are valuable in spite of the slightly dated dialogues. PDF’s and audio files are avialable at the link provided.
You might also like the How To Learn Any Language – Spanish page. They have a good profile of the language and some resources for learning it.
I first studied Spanish in High School and I suppose at the time I was under the impression that it was possible and normal to “learn” and be fluent in a language from a 2 year course in school. By the end of year two though, we were still conjugating the same verbs in the present tense and just touched on a simple future tense. All in all it was disappointing. There are perhaps many reasons it was disappointing, but even at the end of 2 years of Spanish class I thought the best I could do were very simple sentences about what I had, how old I was, what my name was, where I was from and asking the same questions…. nothing very …. applicable.
In college I took German and was blown away by how much we were able to learn there in just two semesters. Had time allowed I would have moved on to intermediate German, but never did. At that point in time I was reading through some of the German language newspapers with some success and had bought a cheap used German reading book with various fairy tales. I then studied a bit of French for a trip to Quebec and spent the better part of the next decade lightly browsing news texts and audios in multiple languages more drifting and grazing than learning.
When our cable broadcaster picked up a few Spanish language channels I felt as though it was time to make a commitment to really learning a second language though. So, I told myself that I would study Spanish for 5 years as it seemed the most useful and available.
At the outset I was fairly rusty on the basics, but present tense verbs were pretty simple to refresh and review just from online resources. I also made a good use of free vocabulary trainers early on to get some of the more common words under my belt. Then I moved onto dual-language readers. These are, I think, very good because they usually present short stories with one language on the left hand page, and the language you’re learning on the right hand page. Realize that CONCEPTS get translated not words and you can quickly improve your reading skills this way. Additionally, they many times will have word lists accompanying the book.
Since the beginning I’ve tried my hand at following spoken Spanish. The easiest and most approachable tended to be documentaries on Discovery en Español, but news programs also were fairly approachable. I certainly didn’t understand all that was said, but usually enough to have a clue of the subject matter.
Madrigals Key to Spanish was another book that I made use of early on. It’s a good text book of sorts for those not taking a formal class. It had a good number of basic rules and concepts that I still like to refer back to as a refresher. At this point I also found a For Better or Worse comic strip book in Spanish. This was another good way to learn in an entertaining way.
I’ve made good use of the FSI Programmatic Spanish course that is available for free online. Some of it was painfully slow at the beginning, but I thought it would be of use to go back to the beginning and follow an audio course to the point of being almost annoyingly easy at the beginning to make sure I filled in gaps in my understanding.
My most ambitious early project and one that paid the most results was a reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy of books. In my teens I probably read through the entire set once a year in English and they have been favorites since then. They’re stories that I know well and in spite of my lack of Spanish vocabulary at the time I thought it would be a good thing to try. It was quite a challenge. The first few pages I was looking up every word I didn’t understand which made for VERY slow going. At some point I decided to forgo the looking of EVERY word and force myself to push on and try to use what I did recognize to tell me where we were in the story. Eventually I was identifying the sentence structure very well. I was easily able to identify what was going on for each page and find words that were very common which I would look up. This made for a bit more enjoyable if still difficult reading through.
By the end of my first pass through the books I really felt as though my vocabulary had expanded by leaps and bounds. I proved this to myself by reading through the books a second time. It was a much more complete reading as this time through I spent more time looking up adverbs and adjectives (while the first time through I was stuck on nouns and verbs.) I’ve since gone on to read Isla Tesoro (Treasure Island) and am currently reading Isabelle Allende’s Zorro. Other readings that I’ve used that have helped have been Selecciones magazine (Readers Digest’s Spanish language magazine.) Although, the subject matter there has many times bored me. (I get tired of reading how to make my skin look 10 years younger/etc…. I guess I’m not in their target demographic. Wrong gender I suppose.)
As my vocabulary has expanded my ability to recognize and follow conversations in tv and movies has expanded. I’ve made heavy use of the subtitles and extra audio tracks of our dvd collection. Starting off with English language/Spanish Subtitles, then moving to Spanish Language/English subtitles, then Spanish language/Spanish Subtitles and finally Spanish Language no subtitles. Spanish Language with Spanish subtitles can be a bit distracting because I find myself reading more than listening. (And subtitles don’t always faithfully copy the exact words used in the audio track.) As I’ve gotten quicker at my recognition I like to make note of where the translations differ….
Another tool that I’ve used along the way is music. I found a few cds of Spanish language music and have listened to those. I’ve found transcriptions of lyrics online (which in a couple cases were WRONG.) I’ve listened to those quite a bit (and still am looking for and listening to new songs.) This can be a really entertaining way to improve your language skills and vocabulary. Find a genre of music that you can at least stand to listen to and after a while I think you’ll find your tastes have opened up to a few more genres. (It also helps to find something with clear, up front vocals.)
The Spanish language cable channels we get have a fair number of telenovelas or soap operas. At first I just rolled my eyes at them and flipped channels, but I did find that some of them were a bit more entertaining in a campy sort of way. (In fact, the novelas set in a historical time period are my favorite – I don’t care much for those set in the present time.) Online, there is a website that does English language recaps (or summaries) of the novela episodes so you can help test your understanding and fill in gaps that way. What I think helps is you get involved with seeing a story unfold and so you actively listen for details. (Telenovela recaps in English) Who knows, maybe at some point you can start contributing? I think a good way to get started in your listening comprehension is not long after you start. There is a great telecourse that’s been around for a while – it’s basically a 52 episode soap opera done as a learning course – so they give “listening comprehension” kind of reviews in each episode. It is called Destinos and can be viewed online learner.org (Annenberg foundation.)
The first few episodes of Destinos have some English if I remember correctly – they encourage you to not be concerned if you don’t understand EVERYTHING, but to try to follow the story and key in on the things you CAN catch and understand. That’s really the way we learn anyway, we didn’t wake up suddenly knowing every word in English. (Even now I come across words I’ve not heard before.) In retrospect I remember not understanding everything I heard on the news when I was little. We all had to learn word meanings over time in our first language.
I’ve gone through stretches with the novelas where there weren’t any stories that really “grabbed” me, but the nice thing about telenovelas is they don’t go on for ages like US soap operas. I kind of think of them as extended mini-series. (Remember North and South…) So, you’ll see maybe 50-120 episodes out of a novela with all the campy soap opera cliches – evil twins, babies switched at birth, long time vengeance, evil plots galore…. fun stuff.
The thing I like best about my approach these days to studying languages is that there are so many different ways to approach it, it’s hard to get bored. If I get burnt out on listening to music, I can go and pick up a magazine or short story, or visit the wikipedia (online encyclopedia available in a variety of languages.) Or just work through a dictionary of the 500 most common verbs and their conjugations, or tune into some news, or a novela, or…. well you get the picture.
I think the biggest thing I should suggest is to be patient with yourself and give yourself time to learn. There are some people that are very gifted and can pick up new languages very quickly, some children are talking at 2 and 3 years old. Be patient with yourself and keep finding new ways to learn. I think it’s possible to learn the basic structure in a fairly short time and then spend years learning vocabulary.
I mentioned Rocket Spanish above and they now have a free 6 day course that you can sign up for using the form below:
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