I forget where I got the idea of “Friday linkfest” from but it was some other blog that came up with it. Anyway, what I (try to) do each Friday is just give you a list of links to helpful resources with a short description and/or review of each one. Let’s get started.
Spanish Language Blog, by Elina Varzi
This is a relatively new blog by someone (Elina, pictured left) who has been learning Spanish on her own for a while now and decided to share what she had learned with people (precisely how this blog got started 10+ years ago, so that’s part of why I like it). A few of her posts that I like:
HiNative
I use this service so much, it’s fantastic. This is basically just the “ask a native” service, that’s it, that’s the best way I can describe it. I really recommend subscribing to their paid service (you can use it for free as well if you’re willing to answer other people’s questions about your native language, I just don’t have the time). Whenever you have a question about the language you’re learning, you just post it here and you’ll have an answer from a native speaker within a few minutes, typically. It’s extremely useful.
Coursera Course: “Learn Spanish: Basic Vocabulary Specialization”
I haven’t taken this specific course but I have taken a lot of Coursera courses in the past and they’ve always been very good, and this one has lots of good reviews, so it’s almost certainly excellent for beginners (that’s who it’s designed for). If you’ve taken it, please leave a comment and let us know about your experience.
Menéame
This is just Spanish Reddit. There, if you know what Reddit is, you’ve got it and I need say no more. If not, Reddit is a social news site where all the content is submitted by and voted on by the users. There are comments…many, many opinionated comments. Menéame is just that, but in Spanish. You can see news that’s of interest to people in Spanish-speaking countries and read their comments about it. If you’re feeling brave you can make an account and comment yourself.
If you’re learning Spanish…
As you know and I’ve mentioned elsewhere, conversing with native speakers is crucial and has to be done sooner or later. A great way to do this is via online classes where the native speaker is the teacher. I personally can recommend a service called GoSpanish (this is my review of them), having tried it myself. You can get unlimited classes with them (online, via a video call using a Skype-like system) for as little as $39 per month – that’s insane. You could take multiple one-hour long classes every day and just pay $39 a month for it if you wanted. They also guarantee you won’t have more than about five students per class, and in my experience it was less than that (sometimes it was just me and the teacher).
Also, I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish from popular media (movies, TV shows, music, etc.) that you can get on Amazon in Kindle or paperback format. If that interests you and especially if you’d like to support my work, I’d really appreciate if you could check it out here on Amazon, it’s called The Telenovela Method.
Hope that helps, please consider subscribing to my emails (sidebar on the right) or at least push notifications for when I put up new blog posts. My social media accounts are on the slidey thing on the left (I’m active on YouTube, Instagram, Tiktok, Pintrest, Facebook, and Twitter).
Cheers,
Andrew
