learn Spanish

Vernaculo, originally uploaded by El Pelos Briseño.

Tomada en Xochimilco. Entre todos los musicos que se acercaban, tambien habia conjuntos de musica nortena.

A video lesson about Spanish Reflexive Verbs. This is in addition to my other post about reflexive verbs here. Learning Spanish Reflexive verbs seems a little more difficult for some people. Here’s a better explanation about the grammar of reflexive verbs from a Professor with an entire Youtube series on Spanish grammar.

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Originally posted 2008-03-08 03:39:59. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A new free language-learning web application, gives you just 10 words each day to learn in one of 15 different languages. It’s called Learn it Lists and the goal is to learn a little every day and by seeing the list on your home page as a google gadget, myspace, facebook and many others, you’ll learn by repetition. To get started, go to your google home page and add the learnitlists widget, register by clicking the register button.

It may still be in beta on facebook and myspace, but it’s available on hi5 , Orkut and igoogle (google’s homepage). You don’t have a choice of the vocabulary list, but you can show or hide the answers whenever you want.

It’s free at the moment (from their website) -

In order for us to run our basic level service without charge, we require all users to answer one question from us every day. You will find this question on the control panel. Individual answers will never be made public, but combined to provide useful but anonymous data. We can then use this data to fund further development.

I only recently signed up for this myself and haven’t see the questions or how much of a pain it is to answer a question a day. What if you miss a few days? Do you have to answer 5 or 10 questions to catch up? We’ll see.

Update: I took mine off of my igoogle home page already. Every time I would go back to my home page, it would default back to Czech. I gave up after I would have to re-sign in or re-register to get it back to Spanish. I may still try it again later.

Learning with a group or at least a partner is always easier especially when it comes time to practicing your conversation skills. In order to learn to speak Spanish, you have to SPEAK SPANISH!

For those of us that don’t live in Mexico, Latin America country or a Spanish speaking neighborhood in the states, I found a great tool to find someone to practice with. It’s called Live Mocha.com. There are listening lessons, writing lessons and speaking lessons. When you’re done with a writing lesson, it’s submitted to the community and you grade someone else’s writing lesson that’s learning English. The same with a speaking lesson.

It’s also kind of like a language learning myspace. You invite your friends to learn with you and can invite other members already learning on Live Mocha to be your friends. If you invite five friends you get to listen to the free audio podcast.

It really is a cool concept and as far as I can tell everything is free and there are no ads on the site because everyone is helping each other. Part of it might be used as a dating site, because one of the questions on your profile is if you’re in a relationship or not and you can upload your picture on your profile. But that seems to be a very small part of the entire site.

Overall it looks very promising to find some people to actually practice your Spanish with and you’d be helping people learn English at the same time.

Originally posted 2008-03-05 03:43:28. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

I’m going to expand the scope of this blog because even though I’ve never been deep into Mexico and would only be able to go there on short vacations, there are plenty of opportunities to experience the Spanish language in the United States, especially in the Southwest.

You don’t have to be in the Southwest to have Hispanic neighbors or coworkers.

You will be a more valuable employee if you can speak Spanish in most jobs and your job doesn’t even have to be in the Southwest.

Learning Spanish is important because Spanish is everywhere.

Guest Posts

If anyone is interested in telling people about how they really learned Spanish, ex-pats living in a Latin American country or even here in the States, let me know at learningspanishblog@gmail.com I’d like to know, when you lived in a country, how were you able to pick up grammar and the more technical aspects of speaking, reading and writing. Plus what products or books or any other resources you found helpful.

A short video about Costa Rica from Travel Video Store. It’s actually just a short teaser to buy their longer videos of other people vacationing in Costa Rica. Kind of short, but the scenery of the rain forest and other sights are pretty good along with some facts about Costa Rica.

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Originally posted 2008-03-09 03:07:11. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

Sesame Street Spanish

Download Sesame Street episodes completely in Spanish, completely free from iTunes. You need iTunes to download these episodes.

Most of us gringos have trouble trilling our r’s and especially the Spanish rr’s. Everything I’ve been able to find says practicing this tongue twister over, over and over is the best advice I can find. I’m open for any other suggestions!

Erre con Erre Cigarro
Erre con Erre Barril
Rápido corre el carro
Repleto do ferro en el ferrocarril

Here’s another tongue twister I found just for fun.

Pablito clavó un clavito
Que clavito clavó Pablito

I actually found a news article about it -

The secret behind Beyonce’s Latin crossover hit
I did this exercise with her, “Erre con erre cigarro, erre con erre barril, rapido corren los carros.” She’d be laughing, and I’m like, “Beyonce, trust me, do this.” She stands there literally sometimes six hours nonstop in front of the microphone trying to get this right. That’s why she’s a superstar.

It must work! In case your wondering here’s Beyonce’s album Imprescindible on iTunes and for those that don’t have iTunes. Beyonce on Amazon MP3. Click on the link to hear a few seconds of it. Spanish is everywhere and everyone is learning it.

Originally posted 2008-03-10 03:36:47. Republished by Blog Post Promoter

A couple reasons for this post. There are several ways to upload mp3 files and I wanted to see how this one looked and make sure it worked.

Another is to show how advanced Learning Spanish Like Crazy is. Okay, this is a blatant Learning Spanish Like Crazy commercial. Only because I like it so much. This is a 60 second extract of the Spanish conversation at the beginning of each lesson.

Afterwards the conversation is broken down, practiced along with several different variations of the same verbs plus, more verbs and extra nouns. Each lesson isn’t just about the conversation, but more. This is from lesson 15. Halfway through the entire Level 1 and I actually know everything that’s being said here. Not bad if I say so myself.

Level Three of Learning Spanish Like Crazy is rumored to be coming out next year. I’m glad I went with this course over any of the others.

Click the icon to listen, not downloadable, listen only.

Listen Only Learning Spanish Like Crazy Lesson 15 extract