This is a simple technique I developed on my own as part of the Telenovela Method years ago and I’ve just never gotten around to writing about it because it never occurred to me how much trouble most people have learning Spanish pronunciation (note: this actually works on any foreign language).  This is a simple, obvious (once you understand it) technique that’s very easy to learn and, in my experience, will let you pronounce anything (I’ve used it successfully with Spanish, German, and Russian so far).  Let’s get started and learn how to pronounce Spanish words.  I did a quick video demo for you that I’ve included at the bottom.

What to Do

In summary: Break the word or phrase down into the smallest possible pieces, master each one individually, then slowly start connecting them into progressively larger chunks, finally speeding everything up.

In detail:

1. Start at the beginning of the word and master just the first syllable.  Let’s use the word “aeropuerto” as an example.  Click the link to hear native speakers pronounce it on Forvo.  This is a word I had trouble with years ago when I was first learning Spanish and it was actually several months before I could pronounce it properly.  First, just learn to say the initial “ae” sound correctly, it just sounds like the English word “eye”.
2. Next: “ro”.  Don’t stick the two together yet, go slow…piece by piece.  “Ro, ro, ro…ae, ae, ae…ro, ro, ro…ae…ro…ae…ro, ae-ro, ae-ro, aero, aero, aero”.
3. Now let’s do “pue”, it’s like “p-weh”.  Just say “Pue” several times until you’re pronouncing that one particular syllable just like the native speaker.
4. Let’s go back and review.  Say “ae-ro” again a few times, slowly speeding up to “aero” until you’re saying it just like the native speaker and just as quickly.
5. Let’s do “erto” now.  It’s just “air-tow” with a rolled “r”.  Say: “er, er, er, er-to, er-to, erto, erto, erto”.
6. Let’s make bigger chunks by putting them together.  How about “puerto”?  Say: “Pue…pue…pue…erto…erto…erto…pue-rto…pue-erto…puerto…puerto…puerto”, starting slowly and then speeding up.
7. Let’s slowly put them all together to form the whole word we want to say: “Ae…ro…ae…ro…ae-ro…ae-ro…aero…aero…pue…erto…pue…erto…pue-erto…puerto…puerto…aero…puerto…aero…puerto…aero-puerto…aero-puerto…aero-puerto…aeropuerto…aeropuerto…aeropuerto…aeropuerto…aeropuerto, aeropuerto, aeropuerto, aeropuerto, aeropuerto”.

That’s how you do it.  The above looks tedious and it probably took you several minutes to go through all of that, doing it yourself, but that’s because you were learning how to do it and simultaneously trying to do my example of it at the same time.  When you’re doing this yourself it’ll usually take something more like 15-30 seconds for a word and a couple of minutes for a whole phrase or short sentence.  Here’s a video demonstration of me doing it (takes about 4 minutes but keep in mind I’m going very slowly and explaining what I’m doing along the way):

It’s really very simple: just break it down into the smallest possible pieces, master each one individually, then slowly start putting them together and speeding up.  That’s it.

How to learn conversational Spanish with perfect pronunciation

If you’re particularly interested in learning spoken, everyday Spanish, with a focus on pronunciation, I strongly recommend you check out “the mimic method”, it’s detailed here on the guy’s site.  I’ve tried the Spanish version myself and thought it was excellent (I’m thinking about doing the Russian one now).  The inventor, Idahosa Ness, has learned five languages this way and is frequently mistaken for a native speaker.  If you’re into music you’ll really like it because he tells  you how to incorporate that and he himself initially learned languages by singing them.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

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 of two major problems I’ve noticed:

1. Speed.  This refers to the speed at which people normally talk but it’s not quite so simple as “gosh people sure are talking fast here”.

I know I briefly mentioned this a couple posts ago but I want to expand on it a bit here.

To be able to communicate with people you have to be able to understand them first, and in this context (non-native speaker attempting to communicate with native speaker) I think your ability to understand is actually quite a bit more important than your ability to speak.  Why?  Because they can muddle through and figure out your stumbling, awkward attempts at speaking their language, they can figure out what you’re trying to say, but if you can’t understand them then you’re screwed, that’s it, it’s over, communication has failed.

Now, natives talk at what seems to non-natives a very high rate of speed.  This is where the problem of speed comes in, specifically speed of thought: how fast can you understand spoken Spanish (or whatever the language in question is)?  You may know all the words they’re using, understand the meaning of all the various idioms and phrases and slang involved, but if it takes you longer to do so – to interpret what was just said – than it does for them to move onto the next thing they’re going to say then, again, you’re screwed.  Why?  Because here’s what will happen…

They’ll start to say something (for the sake of example, let’s say it’s a statement that’s ten sentences long) and by the time you’ve figured out Sentence #1, they’ve already said Sentence #2 and #3 which you’ve completely missed – didn’t register at all in your head – because you were entirely occupied figuring out Sentence #1, so now they’re moved onto Sentence #4 – you’ve missed #2 and #3 – where you pick up again, likely somewhere in the middle and not at the beginning unless you were lucky which means you probably won’t get the whole meaning of this sentence either (#4), so now you catch the last half of Sentence #4 and while you’re trying to figure that out they say the next sentence – which you miss completely – and now you hear Sentence #6 which takes you a few seconds to understand in your head and by the time you’ve done that they’re in the middle of Sentence #9 which you catch the last part of before they end with Sentence #10 which you probably won’t get either because you spent at least the first half of it or so figuring out the last part of Sentence #9 that you just heard.

This is the problem.

I shall borrow a very apt illustration from Jeremy Clarkson who was explaining the same problem as it applied to driving a regular car versus the new Ferrari F12 that he felt just overwhelmed you with too much to do:

It’s just like that.  Reading your target language at your own pace, or having a native speak slowly and clearly enough such that you’ve got all the time you need, is like simply hitting one single tennis ball back and forth across the court, whereas (for a non-native speaker still trying to get up to speed in the language) having a native speaker talking to you at full tilt is like being bombarded with dozens of balls all fired at once and being expected to be able to return every single one.

2. Phrasing. Yet again, simply put but not so simple.

What I mean is that each language – and sometimes certain countries or even regions – has its own particular way of putting words together to form information that people want to convey.  They each have their own way of doing this and if you don’t know it, you can’t communicate (or will at least have a very hard time doing so), even if you know and understand every single word that makes up these phrases.

I’ve got so many examples I’ve recently learned here in Spain it’s impossible for me to remember and list them all, but here are just a few:

“¿Me puedes poner [whatever it is you want to order]?”

This is by far the most common way of ordering something at a bar or restaurant, it’s their equivalent of “Could I have…? / I would like… / Can I get…/ etc.”.  It’s a very simple phrase using very common, basic words that any Spanish student with at least a couple of weeks under their belt is likely to know…but…

Almost none of them know that this is how you convey that particular request in that particular context nor would most of them understand what it meant without the context to reference it against.  I didn’t.  I started out saying “Quisiera” or “Me gustaría” and getting weird looks from the natives.  I understand – and have understood for years – what all the components (words, grammar, etc.) that make up that phrase mean, but I didn’t know the phrase itself until I saw it being used by someone else.  It immediately made sense to me (“Me puedes poner” = “Can you put for me”, that is “Can you put this [the product] here in front of me”) but I never in a million years would’ve come up with that on my own if you asked me to tell you how to properly request a beer or coffee at a bar in Spain.

How about another?

“¿Cuando quieres quedar?”

That’s how you ask someone when they’d like to meet (been using it a lot for setting up in-person language exchanges aka intercambios).  Not with “conocer” or maybe “reunir“, like I thought before.  “Quedar” literally means “to stay” or “to remain”, but it’s just how they convey that particular concept.  Why?  I have absolutely no idea.  It may be possible to track down the origins of this but I doubt it.  It’s just the way they say it.

Oh, and an informal meeting is “una quedada” – that’s not even listed in the dictionary when you look up “meeting” but it’s what you’ll use in Spanish the majority of the time you need to say the equivalent to “meeting” in English.  I’ve been told it’s exclusive to Spain.

“No se me dan bien los caballos.”

That’s how you say “I’m not good with horses”.  Let that sink in a moment.  “dan” means “they give” (referring to the horses), so what you’re literally saying is “The horses don’t give me well” (or, if you want it word-for-word, “Not themselves me give well the horses”).  That’s the way you would say that you’re not good with a particular type of people or animal or that you don’t get along well with them.  An English speaker would naturally be inclined to say something like “No estoy bien/bueno con los caballos.”…and that would be completely wrong and either not make any sense at all to a native Spanish speaker or it would convey a meaning that you didn’t want to convey.

The Solution

Is obvious.  It’s simply to teach these things in whatever book or course you’re creating if you’re the teacher.  If you’re the student it’s to make sure you know them before you get in-country.

Actually executing those solutions is a whole other problem altogether.

Lesson learned.  I could prattle on for hours with native speakers via Skype before coming here but I didn’t know how to say these simple things because the context requiring them was never there.  Same thing with what I mentioned before about how I didn’t know how to say “dish-washing detergent” – it never came up in conversation and the popular media (movies, books, TV shows, etc.) I used to learn Spanish sure never mentioned them because they’re not sexy, they’re not entertaining (and that stuff is…entertainment, of course).

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

I just finished reading a fascinating and concise report from the U.S. Department of State’s FSI (Foreign Service Institute) entitled “Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching” that distills what FSI believe are the ten most important lessons learned from having spent the past fifty years teaching diplomats and spies foreign languages to a high level of proficiency, within six to twelve months, where those individuals were starting as complete beginners in the language they had to learn.  I will explain what FSI is and why you should listen to them, I will give you a short summary of the report by telling you what the 10 lessons are (one sentence each), and then I will embed the report below so that you can either read it right here on this page or download it (PDF file) to read later as you please.

For those not familiar, FSI is held in very high regard in the language-learning and linguistics communities, they pioneered many different areas of language learning and a lot of the most successful techniques and courses in use are mostly if not entirely derived from FSI material and techniques.  What is FSI and what does it do? FSI is the branch of the U.S. State Department which is responsible for teaching foreign languages to all State Department personnel and many personnel from other government agencies and the military.  It is the training arm of the Foreign Service and as such runs other courses and classes such as management, diplomacy, culture, etc. but its largest department by far is its School of Language Studies, for which it is also best known.

Regarding FSI…

The reason FSI is held in such high regard is quite simply the standards that they are held to due to the people that they are responsible for teaching: FSI trains our diplomats, military interpreters and intelligence analysts, CIA officers, and some federal law enforcement personnel, and they have a very strict schedule within which they must operate and accomplish some fairly difficult feats.  For example, from the text:

Our programs are not given a lengthy period in which to prepare learners to do their work. For example, students in the Russian program are expected to progress in ten months of intensive training from no functional ability in the language to the ability to read almost any professionally relevant text and discuss in detail with a Russian speaker any and all implications of that text for Russian-American relations. Ten months of intensive language study may seem like a long time, but, in fact, it is very short when the scope of the goal is considered. There is no time to waste with nonproductive activities.

Additionally:

The accountability goes far beyond test scores and end-of-training student evaluations. It goes to whether graduates of our programs can use the language to carry out the important and complex work for which they are responsible. If their language limitations cause them not to be able to do that work, the FSI program heads will hear about it in no uncertain terms. Language educators at FSI get direct evaluative feedback from our clients and stakeholders. When a dissatisfied cable comes to us from post, it receives our immediate attention.

Whatever it is that they’re doing, it has to work, there is no way that it couldn’t–if it didn’t work, and work well, then most of our diplomats (among many other people FSI is responsible for training) wouldn’t be proficient in the language of the country that they’re stationed in, and to say that this would cause problems would be putting it mildly.  I’m not saying they’re the absolute best, I’m saying that you can be guaranteed that what they do does work and that they do know what they’re talking about–as far as the credibility of a source goes when it comes to language learning, it doesn’t get much better than this.  That’s my point.  I guess all I’m trying to do here is convince you that yes, it really is worth taking 30 minutes out of your day to read this report if you’re at all interested in language-learning.

The Top 10 Most Valuable Things Learned by FSI Over the Past 50 Years

This is just a very short summary if you simply don’t have time or want to get an idea of what it’s about before bothering with it, the actual report is below, 17 pages long, each of the following lessons are expanded on in that report with several paragraphs each, and it is absolutely worth reading in full so I highly recommend you do that.  Here’s a very quick summary of their Top 10 Lessons, skip this if you’d just like to go straight to the report:

Lesson 1. Mature adults can learn a foreign language well enough through intensive language study to do things in the language (almost) as well as native speakers.

Lesson 2. “Language-learning aptitude” varies among individuals and affects their classroom learning success (but at least some aspects of aptitude can be learned).

Lesson 3. There is no “one right way” to teach (or learn) languages, nor is there a single “right” syllabus.

Lesson 4. Time on task and the intensity of the learning experience appear crucial.

Lesson 5. Learners’ existing knowledge about language affects their learning.

Lesson 6. A learner’s prior experience with learning (languages or other skills) also affects classroom learning.

Lesson 7. The importance of “automaticity” in building learner skill and confidence in speaking and reading a language is more important than has been recognized by the SLA [Second Language Acquisition] field over the last two decades.

Lesson 8. Learners may not learn a linguistic form until they are “ready,” but FSI’s experience indicates that teachers and a well designed course can help learners become ready earlier.

Lesson 9. A supportive, collaborative, responsive learning environment, with a rich variety of authentic and teacher-made resources, is very important in fostering effective learning.

Lesson 10. Conversation, which on the surface appears to be one of the most basic forms of communication, is actually one of the hardest to master.

The Report

I’ve embedded it below so that you should be able to read it right here on the page if you like, or you can just download the PDF file and read it on your computer, here’s a direct link to the file if you’d like to download it, and here’s the embedded version (click the magnifying glass to make it larger or click the arrow in the upper right hand corner to open it in a new tab or window with Google Docs):

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

I want to quickly tell you guys about a fantastic resource that’s available to you and is especially good for beginners and even those at an intermediate level: children’s books.  They’re fun to read (how could you dislike a story about a talking worm, or three little bears that live in the woods?), and they use very simple grammar and syntax and common, basic vocabulary.  They’re perfect for learning a new language.

Not only can you go down to your local public library and borrow a few (depending on how big it is, this may not be possible or their selection may be very limited) but you can also find tons and tons of them online, many for free (yes, I’m about to show you where!).

The International Children’s Digital Library

Just go to the Spanish section of The International Children’s Digital Library, and you’ll find that there are currently 168 books in the Spanish section, all of which you can read right there on their website for free (just click on the book you want, and then click on the link on the left where it says “Read This Book”)!  Awesome, right? And, for those of you learning other languages, please note the drop-down menu on the above-linked-to-page where you can choose from dozens of other languages as well!

Amazon

Amazon has got a fairly wide selection of children’s books in other languages, including Spanish.  In fact, they’ve got an entire foreign-language section within their Children’s Books section, with the Spanish one (here) being, by far, the largest with 476 books currently listed.

If you’ve been putting off reading Spanish because you think you’re just not advanced enough yet and you’ve tried reading maybe some Spanish blog posts or newspaper stories and could barely understand anything, well guess what? You’re fresh out of excuses now, aren’t you?

I can’t emphasize enough what a fantastic method this is, you really ought to try it, it’s fun, you learn tons of the language, and you’re learning all the right stuff that you need to learn as a beginner: the basic, common things that even children are expected to know.  Isn’t that the sort of stuff that you’d want to learn first and foremost anyway?

Please, please, please: if you have any other similar resources or sites you know of where we can read or download children’s books in foreign languages, post them in the comments and I’ll edit them into this post and give you credit, we’re all about helping each other learn here, also…  If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

It’s back!  Friday Linkfest actually got a bit of attention the last time I did it, and I think it’s an excellent idea because, as I stated before, it gives you, the reader, a short little list of interesting language-learning stuff to look at that you may not have seen plus linking out to them acknowledges and rewards people who put good stuff out there and really ought to get credit for it.  Let’s see what we’ve got for this week…

Aidan addresses the ever-popular topic among language-nerds of The Easiest Language and his perspective is, honestly, the closest to mine that I’ve read yet.  Motivation does matter, but pretending that there’s no difference between languages in terms of difficulty is simply naively denying what reality actually is.  Difficulty depends, more than anything, on what your native language is and what languages you already know–Icelandic is generally considered one of the hardest languages in the world, but being a Nordic language it almost certainly would be far easier for a native speaker of Norwegian or Swedish than it would be for anyone else.

Simon over at Omniglot tells us the story of Humboldt’s Parrot, a parrot that belonged to a recently slaughtered Amazonian tribe, the Maypure, and whose language would have been completely lost had it not been for the fact that their parrots learned a large portion of their language and those parrots were subsequently acquired by one Alexander von Humboldt who then did his best to transcribe the Maypure language based on what the parrots said.  Very cool 🙂

Vincent does a great job of showing us how easy and fun it can be to learn a language and find native speakers of it, especially in a large city, by describing the Spanish and Mandarin-speaking communities in Philadelphia.

Steve addresses a very common problem (among many) with language teaching as it’s normally done in schools in the United States, specifically that the teachers tend to be far too controlling of how their students learn, the material they’re allowed to learn from and are exposed to, etc.  I’ve honestly never had a positive experience with any language class I’ve taken, so I’m not surprised to hear that this sort of attitude is common.

And Randy makes it on the list two weeks in a row by nailing a personal pet peeve of mine, namely the myth that children have some sort of strangely magical ability to acquire languages that gives them an immense advantage over adults but really only gives adults a bullshit excuse to use for being lazy and not learning a language properly.

Now, I’m actually going to send you to a blog post from several years ago because it’s one that I think every language-learner should read and I’ve referred people to it so many times I’ve lost count.  It’s by Tim Ferriss and is about how he learned Japanese in 3 months in Japan simply by indulging his passion in Judo.  It’s a fantastic read that I cannot recommend highly enough.  Any blogger out there that writes something about how to learn a language by involving it in something that you already like or are passionate about like a hobby should read this first and be sure to refer to it in their post (I’ve read about a dozen such posts, by the way, seems as though everyone comes up with that one and, worse, thinks they’re the first one to ever think of it).

That’s it, I hope you found something interesting here and if you’ve got any additional suggestions please please please put them in the comments, anything at all interesting you’ve come across recently you’d like to share that you think someone might find useful is more than welcome!  Also…if you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below!  Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It’s available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It’s currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

This is something new I’m going to start doing if for no other reason than to make myself start posting more frequently and consistently, plus I read all sorts of cool language-learning related articles every day on the dozen or so blogs I’m subscribed to, plus people I follow on Twitter are always posting interesting stuff on there, and I really ought to share them with my readers who may or may not have seen them plus linking out to them acknowledges and rewards people who put good stuff out there and really ought to get credit for it.

Benny teaches us about St. Paddy’s day and the Irish language – St. Patrick’s claim to fame in Ireland was bringing Christianity to the Irish when so many others had tried and failed.  Know why he succeeded? Because he spoke to them in their own language when every other preacher before him talked at them in Latin.  Pretty cool, huh?

Jennie teaches us how to curse in French, and explains the French confusion with certain words being bleeped out on American and British television, which I particularly liked because I, like the French, find that sort of behavior to be shamefully stupid, I hate that we’re still so prudish and backwards even in this day and age.

Pete explains the subtleties of learning a language, how implicit learning works, and why you can really only learn by doing.  This is something Benny has talked about repeatedly and is why he emphasizes speaking so much: you can’t learn how to speak a language by any means other than speaking it.  What makes this post special is that Pete actually goes into detail explaining precisely why this is the case and how it works.

Aaron talks about putting in the time necessary to learn a language and how Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers applies just as much to truly mastering a language as everything else.  I’ve talked before about how important motivation is, and the reason it’s so important is because it’s necessary to succeed in a language because of the amount of time and hard work you have to put in: my favorite way of phrasing it is to say “You have to be consistently persistent.”, and that applies to succeeding in anything, not just learning a language.  By the way, if haven’t read Gladwell’s book, I highly recommend you do so (Amazon link), it’s excellent.

Randy learned Polish in 8 days…well, not really, but what he did do is demonstrate just how much you can learn in such a short period of time and how fantastically effective and important it is to just dive right in and go!  Eight days of plowing through a book on basic Polish got him to the point where he was chatting (not well, but he was speaking and they could understand him!) with native speakers.  Also, he talks about how understand the basic grammar to some degree was helpful, and I’m actually not surprised, I’m not quite on the side of some my fellow language nerds who insist that learning formal grammar to any degree is useless, though I would definitely say that you shouldn’t be emphasizing it, you should be emphasizing actually speaking with people.

And Cracked (yeah, I know, but they’re generally funny and not too horribly inaccurate) tells us about the 5 stupidest ways that movies deal with foreign languages.  The bit about Sean Connery in The Hunt for Red October is dead on, it sounded like a Scotsman making a very poor attempt to imitate a Russian accent, which is because that’s precisely what it was.

And a new study has come out showing that speaking a second language can delay the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s by 5 years.  If you don’t use it, you lose it, I’m not surprised to hear about this.

I learned to speak conversational Spanish in six months using TV shows, movies, and even comics: I then wrote a book on how you can, too

I have a whole method and a book I wrote about it called The Telenovela Method where I teach you how to learn Spanish from popular media like TV shows, movies, music, books, etc. that you can all find online for free.  It was the #1 new release in the Spanish Language Instruction section on Amazon for nearly a month after it came out and currently has 17 reviews there with a 4.9/5 stars average.  It's available for $7.99-$9.99 for the e-book version depending on who you buy it from (Kindle version on Amazon is now $7.99) and $16.99 for the paperback (occasionally a bit cheaper, again, depending on who you buy it from).

It's currently available in both e-book and paperback from:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew