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(Re)Learning Spanish

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alucidwake
Newbie
United States
nickaxel.net
Joined 5104 days ago

1 posts - 1 votes

 
 Message 1 of 3
05 December 2010 at 6:54am | IP Logged 
Hi everyone. I just came across this website as I have been (re)learning Spanish over
the past month or so. I took Spanish in high school for 4 years, and in the end was
able to pretty well think in Spanish. That was maybe 5-6 years ago, having learned (and
since lost) a bit of Italian since then. I'm going to be moving to Chile in about two
months, so I found this website in a search to maximize my efficiency!

I've been using Rosetta Stone, because as one who does not know much about learning a
language, it was my first choice (marketing). I'm about midway through level 2, and
recently I've been communicating with my job via email in Spanish. I'm realizing by
doing this that the Stone, at least at my level so far, has not totally given me the
tools to create my own sentences and ideas, as I need to do in this setting. I'm
relegating this to the fact that RS doesn't teach grammar; at my level it's going
through many tenses in a very short period of time for one or two words and one or two
conjugation subjects, and it's not easy for me to really understand it in this way.

So after looking through this forum for a bit I realize that I need to supplement this!
My biggest struggles are either that I don't have the specific word I'm looking for, or
I don't know how to structure the sentence. This may sound dumb and obvious, but with a
background in Spanish I feel that vocab and grammar are most important for me to
supplement RS with. Can anyone recommend me a book that is strong in these areas?

When I was learning Spanish in school, and what I've realized after going through what
I have of RS, is that having a challenge in front of you is really helpful. Tests,
quizzes, activities, etc whatever. In RS it's quite easy to memorize the images, and
sometimes I feel like it is not teaching me enough at one time. So if there was some
book that had a lot of 'challenges' (I'll call them that), I think that may be helpful.

Thank you for your time (it's a long post) and hopefully your suggestions; I really
really appreciate it!
1 person has voted this message useful



MixedUpCody
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5257 days ago

144 posts - 280 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish, Mandarin

 
 Message 2 of 3
11 December 2010 at 8:09am | IP Logged 
Hey Alucidwake,

     I would recommend you get a good frequency dictionary from Amazon or use Wikipedia's. I agree with you that vocab is the most important thing. My personal opinion is that RS is pretty useless, but if that's all you have than it's better than nothing.

     Depending on your learning style, getting a good parallel text Spanish reader is a great way to learn grammar, if you can intuit it. If you prefer more instruction in grammar I would recommend the Practice Makes Perfect Verbs, and Preposition books. They also have some good vocab that you can take.

     My final suggestion would be to get a good SRS, I use Anki because it's free and I don't need anything more complex. I have included links to stuff I think might help you. Good luck!

Cody

http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Makes-Perfect-Spanish-Tenses/ dp/0844273341
http://www.amazon.com/Practice-Makes-Perfect-Pronouns-Prepos itions/dp/0844273112
http://www.amazon.com/Frequency-Dictionary-Spanish-Vocabular y-Dictionaries/dp/0415334292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid= 1292051235&sr=1-1
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists/Spa nish1000
http://www.amazon.com/Short-Stories-Spanish-Penguin-Parallel /dp/0140265414
http://ankisrs.net/
1 person has voted this message useful



NYC_Trini_Span
Diglot
Groupie
United States
Joined 7224 days ago

60 posts - 66 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish

 
 Message 3 of 3
25 December 2010 at 9:23am | IP Logged 
He is right because I used learning Spanish like crazy for speaking but at the same time I used the practice makes perfect verb book , and also the practice makes perfect pronouns and prepositions. I found when I moved to dominican republic my school used the same book but I was already 50 pages through with my own copy! It must be good

I must add that since adding the free FSI programmatic Spanish I have learned a few extras not easily found elsewhere. That program is mainly focus on word order and learning the structuresm in fact vocab does not come in abundance until level two - level one is more structure learning practices


1 person has voted this message useful



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