About Me

My name is Andrew, and I am a language geek.

I’ve been interested in learning new languages since I was about 12 years old when I got my parents to order me Level 1 of Pimsleur’s French for my birthday (I barely speak any French at all at this point, by the way, but it is on my hit list!).  I have also always wanted to travel extensively and not just travel, but actually live (as in, for years at a time) in other countries–you see, I really don’t believe that you can learn very much about another culture, country, and people simply by visiting them as a tourist for a couple of weeks, and it’s even worse if you can’t speak their language.  That’s ultimately what really fascinates me, it’s my passion: learning about other cultures and people who are different from me.  I could literally spend the rest of my life moving from country to country every 3-5 years and picking up, ooohhh, say a dozen or so languages along the way.

This brings me to my point about languages: you can not truly understand a people and their culture without speaking their language.  Just forget it: if you’re not willing to learn to speak to them in their native tongue, you’ll never really “get” them, I don’t care what else you do.  You have to go to their country, actually live there for, at the very least, 6 months or  a year, and actually be conversationally fluent in their language before you hit the ground there. This means you’ve got to get fluent on your own, without immersing yourself in-country.  Before, without having a local friend who was a native speaker, this would have been nearly impossible.  But now we have…THE INTERNET! Dum-dum-dum!!!

You likely have very little idea of all the various resources out there that can help you learn even the most obscure language, let alone how to properly integrate them all into a system that you can use at home to effectively teach yourself to be conversationally fluent in any language you want.  This is where I come in: I love this stuff, it’s my passion, I don’t even consider learning a new language “work”, and I’ve been teaching myself Spanish for the last 3 1/2 years, and Japanese for the past few months.  I’ve amassed a great deal of knowledge about how to do this–not just learn Spanish (though I do know a lot of specific information about that, as opposed to any other language), but how to learn any language on your own.

I am still in the process of figuring this stuff out, so this isn’t so much the professor instructing the student as it is the more advanced student helping the beginner and also kinda working together and teaching each other.  You get to learn along with me, meaning that as I learn new things and figure out more efficient and effective methods, find new resources, and pick up new tricks we’ll go over them together and sort all this stuff out, and figure out what works, what doesn’t, and how to most effectively utilize it.

There will be discussion, experimentation, practice, and tricks, tips, and resources you won’t find anywhere else because this will be the first place to discover and publish them (it could be you that figures something cool and new out, it could be me, honestly I don’t really care as long as it gets discovered and put out there for everyone to use).

I hope you’ll stick around.

Also, if you haven’t seen it yet, please have a look at the front page where you can sign up to get my 3-part e-mail series where I cover the Top 33 most useful free Spanish-learning resources available online, what language exchanges are and why it’s impossible to get fluent on your own without them, and how to use Spanish chat rooms to teach yourself Spanish. Also on the front page I’ve put my comprehensive guide to using/navigating this site that I’ve put together for everybody and is now featured here: How to Use This Site To Get Fluent in Spanish NOW (and yes, all of it’s free) – it covers all of my most popular posts on How To Learn Spanish. Also, if you like what you see here PLEASE SUBSCRIBE to my Twitter feed and/or RSS feed so you can be updated any time there’s a new post.

Cheers,
Andrew