The Spanish Subjunctive Explained: How the Subjunctive Works Plus a Mnemonic Trick to Help you Remember When to Use It (The W.E.I.R.D.O. System)
I couldn't find a picture that related to what I was writing about (I always try to do that), in this case the Spanish subjunctive, so here's a picture of my idea for an anti-gravity device based on a cat with some buttered toast on its head - what do you think? The...
Learn Spanish from the News #3: The Prado Museum’s New Outdoor Exhibition
We continue with our series of Learn Spanish from the News where I take short news clips and turn them into short Spanish lessons by teaching you some of the language contained within said news clip. This one is about how the Prado Museum has adapted to the recent...
Friday Linkfest July 9th, 2020: A pedantic Spanish journalist, a great YouTube channel to learn Spanish, a free site that helps you learn languages from music videos, and more!
And here is the latest installment of Friday Linkfest where I just post a few links to resources I think will help you learn Spanish or languages in general along with a short description. If you have any suggestions for next Friday's post please shoot me an email...
Learn Spanish from the News #2: The National Gallery in London Reopens
In this series, "Learn Spanish from the News", I'll take short news clips and use them to teach you some of the Spanish used in them. Today we've got a clip just a bit over a minute long from RTVE in Spain talking about the reopening of The National Gallery in...
Spanish Study Abroad (learning Spanish in Spain, Mexico, etc.)? You probably don’t want to do that…
I get the appeal: sounds like fun, makes sense on the surface, get a little cultured, get a little drunk, catch of a bit of clap, come back home fluent in Spanish. However, it usually doesn't work like that (fun-drinking-STDs yes, fluent in Spanish, no). I say this...
Friday Linkfest for July 3rd, 2020: New tools and resources to learn Spanish and other languages.
And here are just links to resources I've found recently that I think will help you learn Spanish or even just languages in general. I'll include a short description with each one. I try to do these every Friday though that doesn't always happen. DeepL Translator. ...
Spanish Lessons from YouTube Videos #2: “Reglas de Comportamiento en Alemania” by Mariebelle TV
In this series of articles I call, Spanish Lessons from YouTube Videos, I take a video, typically something made by and for native speakers (not a Spanish lesson), and then use it to teach you a bit of the Spanish they use (words, phrases, expressions, grammar,...
Friday Linkfest June 5th, 2020! Recommended Spanish Resources, Tools, Media, and More!
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 Lessons from YouTube Videos #1: “Tipos de Hermanos” by Videópatas
This is by one of several YouTube channels I'm subscribed to which is in Spanish and intended for Spanish speakers (it's not intended for non-native students so they speak at a normal rate and don't explain the language they're using). It's a comedy sketch channel...
A YouTube Channel You Should Check Out if You’re Learning Spanish: Spanishland School
I thought I'd do something a bit shorter today, especially since I've got another post scheduled to come out in a couple hours (I use a short comedy sketch on YouTube to teach you some Spanish, definitely keep an eye out for it!), so I'm going to briefly recommend you...
Let the Language Tell You What You Need to Learn
What this means is: You need to learn those aspects of the language (words, expressions, grammar, syntax) that are in current use by native speakers. You need to learn them in order of frequency of use, meaning that the most commonly used words are the most important...
How to Pronounce Words in Spanish: Here’s Every Word/Phrase in Existence Pronounced by a Native, and You Can Download It (all for free)
Go to Forvo.com, instructions on how to use it follow Ok, so that's the site you want (image on the left links to it or just click here) and here I'll briefly show you how you can download the audio files and then use them to make electronic flashcards (with a program...
How to Vary Your Language-Learning Activities: You Don’t Want to Always Do The Most Effective Thing
Don't do this: it's unnecessary, unpleasant, and not even the best way Shortly after beginning to learn a language for the first time (few weeks, couple of months, something like that), you'll figure out which of the activites you've been doing yields the best result...
Reason #1 You Should Use Movies, Songs, Books, etc. to Learn Languages: Boredom Kills
This is a series of posts I decided to do explaining my reasons for so heavily emphasizing the use of popular media such as movies, series, songs, books, etc. in order to learn a language. I want to say from the outset that I believe the single most efficient...
When to Say “Yo” (“I”) in Spanish (and Why Native Speakers Almost Never Do)
Why It's for the same reason you can just point at a cow and say "Cow!" instead of "There is a cow over there and I want you to look at it!". It's for the same reason that when someone asks you if you would like fries with that you can just say "Yes, please" and not...
How to Say “Tour”in Spanish: Well…it depends on what kind of tour you mean.
I know you probably got here from googling "how to say tour in Spanish" so I'll be very brief here and just get you the answer you want. Unlike English which uses one word for both of these things, Spanish has two different words depending on what kind of tour you're...
How to Memorize Vocabulary Quickly Using Mental Imagery
Introduction I'm going to teach you the method I use to memorize vocabulary nearly in real time as I hear or read it. That means you memorize, briefly (we'll come back to this), new words you encounter while you're watching video content or reading in a foreign...
Persistent Consistency: You Cannot Learn a Language without This
This is what I consider to be the single most important concept you must apply when learning a language, or any complex subject. You have to be persistently consistent. What does that mean?MemoryIn order to learn something, you must be exposed to it...
Español en 3000 Review: Latin American Spanish Podcast
Español en 3000 is a podcast specifically for people learning Spanish. The name comes from the fact that they focus on the 3000 most commonly used words in Spanish, which they claim encompass 94% of spoken Spanish (that's probably about right I'd say). What...
Learn Colombian Spanish #4: “Su merced”
This one isn't as common as the others, but it's still used in certain areas and is featured here mainly because I think it's funny and interesting. "Su merced" literally means "your mercy", sort of the Spanish equivalent of the antiquated form of address...
