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Spanish, fluent from scratch in 1 year.

  Tags: Spanish
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13 messages over 2 pages: 1
garmur
Newbie
IrelandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5551 days ago

16 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 9 of 13
19 January 2010 at 11:29am | IP Logged 
Sprachjunge wrote:
Best of luck, Garmur. I just wanted to second Bastet's advice: it
is very sound. You should make sure that you can understand a lot more Spanish than you
can produce, at least in the beginning. This means that you will have to listen to
hours upon hours of Spanish. Yabla and LingQ are great sites (Yabla is worth the small
fee, in my opinion, and LingQ is free.) Another free site is Audiria--they have tons of
listening material at native speed (and native slurring, haha, which is all to the
good).


Thanks for the advice Sprachjunge, unfortunately at the moment I think I could produce
more Spanish than I could understand (and I can't produce much yet)... at least when
listening to native speed. I'm pretty sure I'll be subscribing to Yabla sometime soon,
I'll have to get to work on my comprehension!

Also, with all these Yabla and LingQ recommendations coming in, I've remembered another
good site I had bookmarked for watching Spanish content (when I was originally getting
interested in learning a language): Lingus.tv
It looks good, although I still can't understand most of the vocabulary used in the
videos.
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garmur
Newbie
IrelandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5551 days ago

16 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 10 of 13
21 January 2010 at 12:08pm | IP Logged 
At the moment, I'm getting through the Practice Makes Perfect Books whenever I get the chance, but I'm also making sure that I learn the vocabulary along the way. This is making progress seem slow, but in actual fact I believe that I'm really doing well, because I would just have to come back and learn all of these words again anyway!

I'm keeping it simple at the moment, but I've also had an idea to build up a kind of online group of people who are learning Spanish or have done already, or who are native Spanish speakers learning English. Not in the usual, scheduled 'language exchange' sense, but in a more casual setting... so I've signed up to twitter, tokbox and skype with the intention of just being able to randomly chat with like-minded people. I'll create another topic on this forum (and others) once I'm good enough to actually speak a little... we'll see how it goes!

I've also cleared my posterous blog and moved it to a new name so I can start from scratch, but I'm unsure of something... whether or not to have the blog about my language learning only, or to still include everything about my other goals for the year?
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garmur
Newbie
IrelandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5551 days ago

16 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 11 of 13
22 February 2010 at 9:08pm | IP Logged 
OK, so it's been a while since I've posted! A lot has been happening which has made it difficult to study as much as I'd like, but I think I can change that now. There's really only two important things for me to update you on for now though:

1) I've started to take lessons online from Enrique Kates, whom Sprachprofi kindly recommended to me. I honestly can't recommend him enough, and I genuinely look forward to my lessons every week. At first, I was hesitant about 'online' lessons, but I'm glad I tried it out. Because I haven't been getting many opportunities to study, I sometimes feel frustrated by my lack of even basic vocabulary when talking with Enrique, but he's always patient and I now have a week off work... so I can study quite a bit.

2) I've started a Posterous blog, and I'd be very greatful if any of you could read what I have there and let me know what you think of it! Am I wasting my time, could it be helpful to other beginner learners and so on? At the moment I've just written about my choice to learn Spanish and what led me to that decision, but I have a lot of ideas for future posts and I'll be updating it regularly if it goes down well! Also of interest, I'm linking any idiomatic phrases I use in English to a definition on the web, so even if you're a non-native English speaker it could be useful material for you to learn common idiomatic expressions.

Anyway, let me know what you think! I'll be posting here again soon, by Sunday at the latest. ¡Chao!

Edited by garmur on 22 February 2010 at 9:08pm

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Sprachprofi
Nonaglot
Senior Member
Germany
learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6474 days ago

2608 posts - 4866 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese

 
 Message 12 of 13
22 February 2010 at 10:11pm | IP Logged 
garmur wrote:
1) I've started to take lessons online from
Enrique Kates,
whom Sprachprofi kindly recommended to me. I honestly can't recommend him enough, and I
genuinely look forward to my lessons every week.

I'm glad you share my opinion of him, I'd hate to be known for giving bad advice ;-)
1 person has voted this message useful



garmur
Newbie
IrelandRegistered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 5551 days ago

16 posts - 16 votes
Speaks: English*
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 13 of 13
28 February 2010 at 10:59pm | IP Logged 
OK, so during this past week a few interesting things have happened. Firstly, I've finished my first 8 lessons with Enrique. They were great and I definitely think I'll be getting a few more in the near future, after I concentrate on building my vocabulary by a large amount. I'd definitely recommend anyone who's starting out in Spanish to check him out, as for the price I think you'd have a LOT of trouble finding a teacher as good.

The other interesting thing that's happened is that I've started to learn Esperanto as well (through lernu.net). I know this may seem silly, but to be honest it hasn't affected my Spanish study in any way. I'm still going ahead with my Spanish exercises in the books I have, and through the Anki program; Esperanto is simply a new hobby alongside my Spanish! I'm really enjoying it, when I first started the lessons on lernu, the way you can form words brought a smile to my face because of its simplicity.

Anyway, the current plan in relation to my Spanish is to just keep firing along with the vocabulary & grammar for the meantime. Once I get to a level I'm happy with, I'll start looking for language partners and then onto the next step.


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