Even if you are an advanced or proficient Spanish speaker, you may find that your Spanish skills start to slip after a while if you don’t live in a Spanish-speaking country and don’t have the opportunity to speak Spanish on a regular basis. Naturally, you don’t want your skills to erode, especially after putting in [...]
I’ve been speaking Spanish for years and have no trouble pronouncing 99.9% of Spanish words. I know I speak the language pretty well because native speakers have no trouble understanding me and I can communicate what I want to communicate. There is, however, one word that I’ve never even come close to mastering. In fact, [...]
Update 18 August 2011 – My colleague Kim McConnell has tested Jetset Spanish and just posted this Jetset Spanish review. *** Today I received an email from Mauricio at Rocket Languages letting me know about a new Spanish course they will soon be launching. The course is called Jetset Spanish. Jetset Spanish has been designed to [...]
The other day on the bus, I noticed a friend of mine practicing her Spanish with the aid of a little book called Spanish 60-Second Grammar Workouts, 140 Speed Tests to Boost Your Fluency. I asked her how she liked it. “It’s great,” she replied. “These little mini-quizzes help keep me sharp on things like [...]
A couple weeks ago I received an email from Patrick Jackson at Learning Like Crazy on the topic of “Spanish slang and informal Spanish words.” Patrick’s emails are always a pleasure to read and I usually learn something new. This particular email taught me an informal Spanish word I had never heard before, but now [...]
I recently came across a Spanish course designed and administered by a teacher named Maria Fernandez. Although I haven’t tried the course, I wanted to bring it to your attention since it appears to be both user-friendly and comprehensive. Maria is an experienced teacher with over 15 years experience. You can get details of Learn [...]
I received the following email inquiring about the best Spanish courses: “I’m looking for the best complete spanish learning system. I hope you can help me. I’m planning on moving to Mexico in a few years & want to be fluent. I’m looking for one that is well balanced w/ grammer, vocab. & the whole [...]
Once you achieve a reasonably advanced level of proficiency in Spanish, you will need to bolster your understanding of idiomatic expressions. To help you do this, you’ll probably want to purchase a good reference book of idioms. Of course, there are several good options. Here’s a review of Barron’s Spanish Idioms. The review includes a few [...]
Quite a few idiomatic expressions use “la mano” which, as I’m sure you know, means “hand”. (Just a quick, friendly reminder that “mano” is feminine even though it ends with the letter “o”. That’s right, it’s irregular, amigo.) Now let’s look at a few expressions using “mano” that I find particularly useful or amusing. darse [...]
I recently had the opportunity to test drive a new software program that’s designed to make it easier for people to learn Spanish verbs. It’s called the Verbarrator. What a fantastic program! This little piece of software (well, maybe not “little” since it contains more than 30,000 audio files) lets you drill yourself on all [...]
