Learn Spanish from the News #1: Common Political Terms in Spain
I love these "learn Spanish from ___" series I do, they're great for generating short, quality blog posts when I'm equally short on ideas for new content, plus they're immediately useful, quickly digestible, and direct, so people tend to like them. This...
Learn Spanish from Garfield! Spanish Garfield Comics Now Available as E-book and Paperback
I was contacted some months ago by the publisher of this, Amp Comics (check out their site there, they have other similar stuff if you like this), who had seen my post about learning Spanish from comics and knew I was a Garfield fan (have been since I was...
Learn Spanish on YouTube #2: Professor Jason
Professor Jason is a channel that just directly teaches Spanish (and some Brazilian Portuguese), that is you just get a series of Spanish lessons on particular subjects (e.g. preterite, subjunctive, irregular verb conjugations, etc.). There are many of those. The...
Learn Spanish on YouTube #1: Spaniards in London
This is the first in a series of posts I'll be doing where I cover as many great channels for learning Spanish on YouTube as I can find. There are many such channels and new ones are being created all the time, not just for Spanish but many other languages as well...
Fantastic Source of Free Online Spanish Videos (some with subtitles!): RTVE.es
RTVE is Spain's state-owned corporate television station, very similar to the BBC in the U.K. or PBS here in the U.S. They're the largest and most popular broadcaster in Spain, and they show a wide variety of news, documentaries, fictional dramas, reality shows,...
Learn Spanish for Real #6: “Estar en el quinto pino” / “Donde Cristo perdió la zapatilla”
It's two-for-one day here on How to Learn Spanish! We're going to cover two phrases in one Learn Spanish for Real post, primarily because they both mean the same thing: something is really far away. For the curious, this is from the Sochi Winter Olympics,...
Learn Spanish for Real #5: “¡Es un atraco a mano armada!”
Literally, it means "this is an armed robbery", or more colloquially, "this is a stick-up". An "atraco" is a robbery or hold-up, "mano" as you likely know means "hand" (but note that it's feminine, so it's "la mano" not "el mano", that's why it's "a mano...
Which Language Should I Learn? Just Ask Yourself This One Question
Who am I interested in? Which culture, which people do I want to learn about? That's it, simple, done. Yes, there are exceptions, people for whom it's not that simple - I'll get to that below - but that's what they are: exceptions. The single most...
Memrise vs Anki: Is Either Better? No, Just Different (and for a different application).
Anki vs Memrise As many of you know - and many of you are as well - I'm a big fan of Anki. People have bugged me about Memrise for years now and, although I've used it a fair bit, I'd never gotten around to writing a proper review of it, so I thought I...
Learn Spanish Vocab Fast with this Fantastic Free Tool
The tool in question is ReadLang, it works with any website in a variety of languages, and makes the process of learning new words from online text much easier than it was before, saving you massive amounts of time and effort. You click the word you don't...
Interested in the culture of other countries and habits of their peoples? I HAVE A NEW BLOG ABOUT THAT!
I've been wanting to write about the culture in other countries for a while now but wanted to wait until I actually started traveling to do so. I'm in Spain at the moment and have had just a ton of observations and interesting little insights into Spanish...
Some Major Insight About Language-Learning from My Two Weeks in Spain
Ok, so I've been here two weeks now, I've done nearly ten face-to-face language exchanges so far (all with native speakers), I've interacted with other natives quite a bit (buying groceries, ordering food, etc.), and I've got some insight I want to share in the form...
My First Face-to-Face Language Exchange (Intercambio) in Spain: Observations and Some Tips
My first in-person language exchange was superb, if you can find a native speaker in your area to work with I can't recommend it enough. First face to face language exchange in Spain. A video posted by Andrew Tracey (@andrewhasacamera) on Sep 8,...
Update #1: A Tour of My Apartment. What Does $700/Month Get You in Zaragoza?
Hey guys, just wanted to post this video for you that I made, I give you a quick (~10m) tour of my apartment so you can see what I'm getting for what I'm paying in this particular location. A couple of things to keep in mind: This is located in El Centro, that is the...
Some Quick Lessons Learned from My First 48 Hours in Spain
First: The problem isn't "speaking Spanish" (or not), it's speaking their Spanish, and fast enough. I found that I could pick up a Spanish paper (I prefer Heraldo because it's local) and easily and quickly read through any article and understand 98% of it...
Learn Spanish for Real #4: “Cogerse un cabreo de cojones” | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words
Have you ever heard the expression "throw a shit-fit"? Well, regardless, you do now know how to say that in Spanish! ...and apparently it's available in t-shirt format, as you can see there on the left (that's what "cabreo de cojones" yielded on Google...
I’m going to Spain!
I have bought the tickets, booked the apartment (and paid the first month's rent), bought the necessary luggage, and I'm about to buy some train tickets to get from the airport in Barcelona where I'm arriving to the city where I'm staying for two months, which is......
Learn Spanish for Real #3: “Llorar como una magdalena” – from Spain! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words
Real quick I just thought I'd share with you an interesting new expression I learned today from one of my Spanish tutors, Silvia (she's very good, check her out if you're in the market!), when I realized it would make a great 3rd installment in our Learn...
What Spanish Verb Tenses You Should Learn First, and Why They’re So Important
First of all, it's "which Spanish verb tenses...", not "what Spanish verb tenses...", but Google tells me the first one is what people are searching for, so that's what the title is. Now that that's out of the way... I'm going to cover 3 things in this article today:...
Another Advantage of a Tutor: MUCH Faster Error-Correction Rate Than Anything Else I’ve Experienced (which means you LEARN faster than anywhere else)
This is a repost from my German blog here, I'm posting all articles about the iTalki 2015 Language Challenge on both blogs. As I'm fond of saying: You learn to speak a language by trying to speak it, poorly at first. What this means is that you learn by...
