Life After Destinos: Sol Y Viento

Read this article over at the PeppyBurro blog.

A New Game That Redefines Spanish Language Immersion

Language learning is a zero-sum game of motivation. They say you need 600 to 2,000 hours of study before you can be reasonably proficient in a new tongue. This can be long and painful if you’re not motivated enough. And you already know that traditional learning methods are anything but motivating. So why not try something new for a change? Remember your favorite game as a child? Didn’t you try everything you could to just get better and better at it? Today’s post is by Ingo Ehrle, who just managed to gamify the Spanish learning process for you to ensure you give the endeavor everything you can, and then some. Over to you, Ingo.

How To Learn Spanish Reading The Bible

You don’t have to be Christian – or even religious for that matter – in order to read the Bible. Well, it might not fascinate you much if you’re not particularly “godly” but if it helps your cause, why not? Who cares what the philosophy is as long as it can teach you what you are aiming to learn. I know what you’re wondering: Of all the gazillion books around us today, why Bible? I mean, Bible is difficult and archaic enough in English, how could it possibly be any good for learning some “practical” and contemporary Spanish? I had the same doubts when I started out but as I started reading, it actually made sense. Let’s dive in and find out.

5 Steps To Turning Facebook Into A Spanish Learning Machine

Facebook – don’t we just love to claim how much we hate it and how it’s ruining our daily routine? Feel free to rant but we both know who’s having the last laugh. With close to a billion users and counting, this phenomena is not going anywhere anytime soon. So you have two options: Either use it to share breakfast and cat pictures and make zero positive impact to your life; or turn the tables and make every minute you spend on it count. What do they say about life, lemons, and lemonade? Yes, it’s more than possible to turn Facebook into a solid Spanish-learning machine and make your social media hours productive! Here, we’ll learn how.

Busuu Vs. Lang-8: The Brief Showdown

Learning Spanish is just one of those endeavors that become several times more fun and inspiring when done with friends. Learning anything, let alone a foreign tongue, is not something one would find terribly engaging if done in isolation. Luckily for our generation, we are spoilt for choice when it comes to collaborative learning. With the social media becoming as integral to our lives as breakfast and TV, it’s impossible for even the most hopeless of loners to stay isolated these days. Here, we’re going to review two services that mix social networking and language learning to bring you the best of two very disjoint worlds. So, let the showdown begin!

The Witchcraft Of Spanish Vocabulary

The very first step to conquering a language is to tame its vocabulary. And sadly, that’s the part that puts off most novice learners because memorizing strange-sounding words is too darn boring! A never-ending chant of rote rehearsal and a nervous prayer can see you through an upcoming test, but the process just won’t cut it if your goal is to actually use the language in the street. It’s a mystery how this incredibly inefficient method has survived this long and still continues to be perpetuated by schools and educators around the world. So is there any nirvana around this assault of monotony in our miserable lives? Anything that could make learning foreign words less painful?

Learn Spanish Watching Telenovelas At DramaFever Latino

Our friend Andrew was terrible at Spanish. He would often complain about how difficult it was and how despite, his most sincere efforts, he would never be reasonably fluent in the language. We always tried to encourage him, but we must admit that we too doubted the prospects of him ever becoming fluent. Even after several Spanish courses and video tutorials, Andrew could barely get started on conversations with native speakers. It was overwhelming and he was ready to call it quits. But in a last frugal effort he decided to take some time and work from Argentina (one of the many virtues of working as a web developer).

Learn A New Language With A Used Brain

Let’s be honest and admit that learning any language, let alone Spanish, is an art most of us lack a taste for. It’s more of an “acquired” taste that needs a lot of optimism and an open mind to fully appreciate. In this article, we take a step back from our core focus and review a very interesting book that talks about languages in general instead of just Spanish. This book does not teach you Spanish or any language for that matter. What it does is a whole lot more – It teaches you how to teach yourself just about any language! Review this book with us and boost your linguistic morale like many others around the world.

What Makes Audiria The Best Podcast For Spanish Learners?

There’s no contesting the immensely important role immersion plays in any rapid Spanish acquisition program. The more Spanish input we get inundated with, the better our chances of eventually being able to produce it. This idea has been carefully explored and evaluated time and again both here and elsewhere. But there are just too many sources of input out there to quickly overwhelm the layman and that’s where we step in, helping you cherry-pick the best for you. Audiria is one such free Spanish learning resource we’d strongly recommend to you, but not without the unbiased scrutiny it’s being subjected to in this review.

Tips On Using The World's Largest Language Learning Community

In the process of acquiring Spanish, we have used and abused an insane amount of free resources both offline and online. It is only with hit-and-trial that you eventually appreciate what works best for you, be it learning Spanish or acquiring any other skill. One of the resources many learners have used quite extensively is Livemocha and this article is going to focus on our experiences – and those of many other Spanish learners all over the world – with it. Having ransacked all that Livemocha has to offer in terms of Spanish, we have managed to put together our own list of strategies around squeezing it for maximum juice.

Google Images – The Best Dictionary The World Can Afford?

Not sure about you but quite a few successful polyglots have spent a shameful amount of time hunting for the perfect Spanish dictionary before finally stumbling upon one right under their nose. Before we even start with any details here, let’s break this to you – traditional Spanish-English-Spanish dictionaries are all often full of incorrect information and are perhaps your biggest enemy if you are using them to just expand your Spanish vocabulary memorizing words off them. Well, before the likes of Oxford® and Collins® go all out suing us, let’s elaborate and ensure anyone learning Spanish stays indebted to us for life!

Kill Frustration With The Language Dojo

Ever wondered why an overwhelming number of Spanish learners end up quitting hardly a few months into their programs? Even better, ever wondered why you felt like quitting learning Spanish out of sheer frustration? Where did that zeal go? Where’s that battle cry you flagged off your Spanish language program with? Today, we’ll extensively talk about a blog that answers just these questions and more! We can comfortably wager that reading the radical, game-changing notes on that blog will change the way you see learning Spanish for good because motivation is everything when it comes to learning anything. Nothing else matters.

Learn Spanish Reading Fairy Tales

This site is an account of my personal experiences with various Spanish acquisition resources and techniques that lie scattered all over the Internet in overwhelming numbers. In the last few posts we have discussed the effectiveness of some of the key immersion techniques that helped me with my Spanish. Today, we’ll elaborate on one of them with a twist. We already know how reading helps build our vocabulary but what to read is often the biggest dilemma someone learning Spanish often faces. This article explains where to find children’s books and fairy tales that are one’s best bets when it comes to learning any language.

7 Sites Spanish Learners Must Bookmark

Out there in the vast expanses of the Internet, there are more free resources available for Spanish learners than can ever be included on any list of any length. While we recognize how important absolute immersion is to one’s language program, it’s almost impossible to ignore the importance of an infinitely rich resource like the Internet. When starting out learning Spanish, we tend to spend a fortune on gathering all sorts of reference materials, such as books, DVDs, courses, etc. for the program. However, today the Internet is brimming with nuggets of Spanish to satisfy the most discernible of learners. Let’s explore.

Spanish Trips Through Comic Strips

Comics are often more interesting and engaging than dry textbooks or novels. Their illustrative graphic format provides for an incredibly engaging and stress-free Spanish language absorption environment as inexpensively as it gets. This important feature makes comics an important immersion tool for Spanish learners. Most of us have devoured scores of comic books as kids totally unaware of their contribution to our acquisition of English. Most of us who are learning Spanish remain oblivious of the fact that Spanish has an equally rich arsenal of legendary comic characters that can more than enrich our learning experience!

Use Twitter, Learn Better

An insane amount of input in Spanish is your ticket to fluency and one of the simplest ways of going into an immersion overdrive is right under your nose: The social network! You heard that right. Total immersion means just that. Total. Absolute. What a waste, in that case, to still be using services like Twitter® and Facebook® in English when they are all available in Spanish without any compromise whatsoever in functionality! If your goal is to eventually speak the Spanish language like you were born with it, spare nothing. Not even your social life. Spanish must invade every aspect of your lifestyle no matter what.

Flash Your Cards And Absorb Spanish

Easy Spanish is no myth. Much has been discussed, both here and elsewhere, about how total immersion accelerates your acquisition of Spanish. There’s one incredibly effective tool that we have skipped thus far and that’s what this article is all about: Spaced Repetition System or SRS. When it comes to nailing the alien Spanish vocabulary SRS is one of the best tools that can augment your regular immersion setup. What it does is slowly but surely wean you away from dictionaries and help you focus more on the insane amount of input you are drawing from the immersion-cocoon you have so painstakingly woven around yourself.