Great study tip!!! For those of you that are studying grammar, you know that Spanish nouns have “gender”. There are masculine nouns and feminine nouns. Why not use blue note cards for the masculine nouns and pink for the feminine nouns?
I know-who has time?! Who wants to do it?! Review your vocabulary cards every day for a few minutes and you’ll see how much more you retain and how much quicker you learn.
While studying, split your cards into two piles “vocab I know” and “vocab I don’t know”. Why spend any more time studying when you don’t have to? Only focus on what you DON’T know. This will significantly cut down on how much studying/reviewing you have to do. Once you’ve conquered all of the vocabulary, go over them again to make sure you haven’t forgotten anything.
In a perfect world, the best way to learn Spanish is to participate in a classroom setting. You will benefit from the instructor’s expertise, education, and experiences. In addition to working with others that are trying to achieve the same goal as yourself “Learning Spanish”! Unfortunatley, the typical community college setting does not work for everyone. On the flip side, nothing beats the attention you receive from one on one instruction (that is if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford private lessons). That leaves two other options: CD ROM/Audio CDs Spanish lessons and online Spanish lessons. Below is information about online study-I’ll write about CD ROM/Audio Cds in another post.
If you can find an online Spanish outlet that fits your needs-go for it! I feel that a mixture of different types of learning environments is the best. There are many great companies that offer services online.
I’ve checked out a few online Spanish lessons:
This offers career specific Spanish lessons. You can do it at your leisure. The pricing seems to be fair and definately worthwhile.
This is a free website. It offers tons of information! I have personally referenced it and used their exercises with clients. It is well worth checking out!
As I come across other online Spanish websites, I will post them.
Studying…yuck! Who wants to do it? Who has time? I’d prefer to watch tv 
Actually, that’s just it-watch tv and study too! When studying, its best to break your studying into “chunks” (short periods of time). A perfect way to do that is when a commercial comes on, pull out your materials and study for the 3 or so minutes until your program comes back on. The objective is to study for brief amounts of time-and not all at once. Watching tv and then taking a break to study during commericals is a perfect way to accomplish this.
Happy Studying (and tv watching)!
Watching programs in Spanish can be tricky and sometimes frustrating. Just as there are many different English dialects, there are many different Spanish dialects too. I personally have a hard time understanding someone from England or Ireland and they are speaking English!
For the beginning student, watching TV in Spanish may be detrimental. It doesn’t take much to get thrown off and become frustrated. This is something you want to avoid. I recommend waiting until you have a few lessons under your belt. If and when you start watching TV in Spanish, I would follow this recommendation: turn on the Closed Caption option on your television. Make sure the language is set to Spanish (not English). This way, you can read what is being said (in Spanish) at the same time as hearing it. It will help you become accustomed to the different Spanish dialects out there and not get thrown off. It’s amazing how many words you miss until you actually see what is being said.
There is a great video program series called Destinos. It is an educational television program created Bill VanPatten Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois. Destinos uses the telenovela (Spanish soap opera) format to teach Spanish-language speaking, listening, and comprehension skills. Early episodes have English-language narration in addition to the Spanish-language dialogue, but the English language content decreases continually, eventually disappearing entirely.
I highly recommend Destinos for anyone learning Spanish or interested in watching a program in Spanish.
Occassionally PBS will run various episodes of Destinos or you can visithttp://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html
and view each of the episodes free of charge! If you prefer to have your own set of VHS or DVDs you can check on Ebay. There is also a text and workbook that are components of the program.
This blog is under development . . . Thank you for your patience . . .