Learning Spanish (or anything else)
Most people who know me know that I’m learning Spanish because I’ve now got to the point where I’m randomly boring them by pointing at inanimate objects and saying stuff like ‘Lavadora’ (washing machine) or ‘Perro’ (dog). I’ve been teaching myself up until three weeks ago when I decided that I’d got to the point where I needed lessons. Its coming up to five months since I got into it all, so I thought I’d share what I’ve discovered so far about learning a language from complete scratch.
It really started when I did a search for online language courses and websites and and after initially finding and signing up to a site called Busuu I finally settled on using another site called Babbel. I did a search on Groupon to see if there were any Babbel offers were going on and as luck would have it I got six months for the price of one on an offer from Groupon, which is a good deal.
Babbel is a flash card type of teaching aid that shows you slides, speaks you the content, and then has you repeat out loud each slide in Spanish (or whatever language you’ve chosen to learn). Cleverly, Babbel actually listens to what you’ve said through your computer microphone and gives you a score out of 100 for each word you pronounce, forcing you to speak right from the start. This is a good thing and is pretty impressive for a web based learning tool.
Babbel also remembers the vocabulary that you have learned so your online vocabulary book grows as you learn. Babbel then forces you to revise words and phrases that you’re not so good at more often than those which you remember more easily. After five months I’m now at the point where some days I have to revise about 200 words! It’s not at all as time consuming as you think, you can whizz through the slides each day and the best thing about Babbel is you get into a routine of logging on each day, doing your revision, and then creeping up the amount of words in your arsenal. After five months my vocab book is on about 1500 words and phrases. It gets quite exciting watching the amount of words you know creeping up, and it has an addictive quality that keeps you learning.
It also has an iPhone app so you can learn stuff on the go. This is pretty cool - learning on your phone when you’re bored is actually a really good way to fill some of those moments where you’re fiddling with your phone but are bored of Facebook updates and Angry Birds.
Babbel attempts to teach you grammar and this is where it falls down - the slides / flashcard system is just not robust enough to teach you anything more complicated than a phrase or word. Babbel does show you some verbs, and it’s not like there aren’t ANY verb learning sections, but due to the complexity of learning verbs in general I personally became frustrated that I just couldn’t get more nuts and bolts of the language out of the Babbel system. After about six weeks of realising that the verbs sections were too light and the information in them just wasn’t sticking I decided to get a bit more serious and buy some books.
The best books I found by far are the McGraw Hill workbooks which teach you stuff bit by bit and are full of exercises - no sooner have you been shown how to do one thing you are confronted with pages of tests to fill in so you can practice. This is much better than just getting a book on verbs and staring at it blankly wishing the information would stick - the McGraw Hill books are all about getting a pencil and actually DOING.
The next thing I realised was that as my vocabulary expanded using Babbel, I just didn’t have enough verbs. The McGraw Hill books really helped, but I knew I just needed some way of learning as many verbs as quickly as possible. Enter Quizlet, an online site which lets you make your OWN flashcards up using any information you want. And the best thing is, you can see all the cards that other people have created, and as luck would have it most people use Quizlet to learn languages. So no sooner has I signed up for free, I was able to use other people’s flashcard sets quite handily called things like ‘The 125 Most Important Spanish Verbs’ and ‘501 Spanish Verbs’.
I then found an app for the iPhone called ‘Flashcards++’ which let me import all my sets from Quizlet and learn and test myself just using my iPhone. In many ways, it’s more fun learning these words on your phone than on your main computer.
Quizlet also has some great tests you can create for yourself on the fly - you can create an instant exam on any sets of words you like, and play games to help you learn the words in your sets. Quizlet is awesome and has solved the problem of learning more specific sets of things, in this case verbs. To be honest, only you as an individual can tell what help you need with grammar and verbs, and at some point you have to ‘get tough’ with the way you’re learning a language. Quizlet is perfect for when you get to that stage.
On the subject of verbs - you need verb tables. Yes you can get them from books, but when you’re doing stuff online you want to be able to access verb tables quickly. The best place I found for tables (and lots of other stuff) is 123teachme.com which has masses of tables. I have folders that drop down in my browser which I have filled with links to individual tables for different words. Every time I come across a verb I don’t know, I visit 123teachme.com, find the verb and then create a link to it via my browser favourites.
I also found this online Verb Tester which is pretty cool.
I also found a website called Study Spanish that is actually the frontend for an entire language course. However, the course and its parts are all available to view on the site for free, and whenever I need something specific this is the site I go to - it’s always written extremely clearly and within seconds I can find a page explaining some part of the language I need some help with.
Another great discovery was that the BBC created an entire online series called ‘La Vida Loca’ which is a full-on video learning course with interactive lessons which runs over 24 episodes. There’s a story, you learn stuff, it’s ‘real’ and helps get you in the mood. I went through all the episodes when I first started Babbel, and now it’s been a few months since I looked at it I’m going to go back and see how much more I remember. The good thing about this series is of course the fact that you get to hear proper Spanish being spoken in context. It’s pretty damn good, and again it’s free.
Watching TV in Spanish has been a bit of a problem as although I have the full Sky thing going on at home, it appears that the one Spanish channel that used to be available is now discontinued. Luckily you can watch Spanish TV online at RTVE which is mostly a version of our own ‘This Morning’ type of thing (cooking, chatting and wotnot) but you can also get news and various other things. Very useful to just put on in the background so you can let the language seep into your subconscious.
Google Translate has been very useful, not for translating websites or anything, but for typing in stuff I’m not sure about, and also watching what happens when you type different versions on the same phrase into it. When I’m testing myself (and now sometimes when I’m doing my Spanish homework now I have lessons) I check what I’m doing in Google Translate. You have to be careful however - it’s not perfect, but it’s very useful.
Back on the subject of books I also discovered you can get books which are Spanish on one side, English on the other. What has been really useful is reading out loud from the Spanish, while keeping half an eye on the English on the opposite page so I can attempt to read the Spanish and give it some meaning, instead of just sounding like a robot reading out a string of words. I’m using a book all about Spanish folk tales, but there are others and at the moment I’m looking for something a little more contemporary - this one looks good.
Some other books that look good are this one and this one and this one, although I haven’t tried them out yet I think they’re next on my list.
Learning Spanish has been great fun, and it’s so much easier to learn a language nowadays thanks to all these online resources than it used to be. Not only easier, but more fun. Hope this post has inspired you to learn a new language - it’s a good time to start!
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