One Advantage of Using a Tutor: They Have a Plan (based on experience with lots of students!)
Note: this is a repost from my German blog. The original article is here. I've tried six different tutors at this point (5 professional, 1 "community" tutor which is just someone who doesn't teach the language as their day job and does online tutoring on...
Learning Spanish Through TV: HBO’s “In Treatment” and its Argentine Remake “En Terapia”
I've got an excellent guest post for you today very much in line with my methods and previous posts, enjoy. -Andrew Watching Spanish-language TV series and movies is one of the best ways to improve your Spanish. First, you’ll be engaged and entertained,...
My First iTalki Tutoring Session in German: What You Can Expect
I'm currently doing the iTalki 2015 Language Challenge which is where if you take at least 20 hours of instruction via their tutors then you can win 400 ITC (iTalki Credits, which are used to buy lessons with the tutors on there, with ten of them costing...
Four Free Spanish Readers You Can Download as E-Books
Very quickly I just wanted to share with you four free Spanish readers I found thanks to a reader (Ron) e-mailing me about one of them and that led me to find three more. What's a "Reader"? It's a book specifically designed to help foreign language...
I’m Learning German and Started a New Blog About It!
I've been meaning to move onto a new language at some point for about a year or so here despite my Spanish not being perfect (it's actually waned a bit since I've been so busy, but I'm back into it now) and I really thought it was going to be French since that's a...
Chat Rooms to Learn Spanish: Real-time Reading/Writing Practice with Native Speakers
I used to have a post here about various chat rooms you could use to practice not just Spanish but other languages as well, however all of those are now defunct and I didn't want to just leave the post up directing people to a bunch of sites that didn't...
How to Learn Vocabulary, Especially Foreign Language Vocab – And I Mean LEARN, Not Just Memorize
Right now I'm going to teach you not only how to effectively memorize vocabulary using a combination of visual mnemonic techniques and spaced repetition, but much more importantly: how to learn foreign language vocabulary, that is how to take that step...
How to Find Example Sentences for Any Spanish Word You Choose (with native speaker pronunciation and English translation!)
Many people have asked me if there was a search engine or software or app or something that would give you contextual examples of any Spanish word you wanted being used, like if you just learned a new word and you'd like to see some actual examples...
HiNative: Ask Native Speakers Questions About Their Language or Culture and Get Answers Immediately
Brilliant. Long overdue. People have been asking for this, wanting this (even if they couldn't exactly describe what it was they wanted), for years now. That's how I would describe HiNative. It's very simple: you have questions, native speakers have...
How to Practice Writing a Foreign Language (and get native speakers to review and correct it for you for free!): Lang-8
If you want to practice writing a foreign language either because you want to practice that separately in addition to speaking and listening practice you're already doing or because you're solely interested in learning to read and write it but not speak...
How to Find Foreign Language Newspapers and Use Them to Learn the Language
Today I'm going to quickly share with you my favorite resource for finding foreign language newspapers plus I'm going to show you my simple and effective method for learning the language from them (you don't need to know any of the language to start doing...
Great Way to Learn Spanish from Music Videos: Lyrics Training! (very short video demo included)
Just wanted to write a very short post today to introduce you to this fantastic free resource I discovered a while back and forgot about: LyricsTraining.com. Here's how it works, it's very simple... They have music videos in various languages from YouTube...
Learn Spanish for Real #2: “Carajo”
Welcome to the second installment of a category of posts I do called Learn Spanish for Real: Spanish Slang, Colloquialisms, and Curse Words! This post will be a sort of continuation on the first one in that we'll be examining the same sentence from the same video,...
Learn Spanish for Real #1: “Berraco / Berraca”, from Colombia! | Slang, Expressions, and Curse Words
This is the first in a new series of posts I'm going to be doing called "Learn Spanish for Real" where I'll teach the sort of Spanish that's commonly used, that you need to know in order to be able to speak like and with a native, but which isn't typically...
Yabla: A Spanish Video Site Specifically for Spanish Learners
Yabla is a website that was designed from the ground up specifically and exclusively for helping people learn languages via videos of popular media in the language they want to learn (TV shows, cartoons, documentaries, etc.) that you can watch (streaming) on the site....
Rocket Spanish Review: Good/Neutral/Bad & Who It’s For and Not For
Perspective: A beginning Spanish learner As with all my reviews, this one will be written from the perspective of a beginning Spanish learner, one which I am intimately familiar with as I have spent quite a bit of time as one, during which I tried a good number of...
iTalki Reviewed: Free Language Exchange Plus a Tutor-Student Marketplace (also: are tutors worth it?)
I've talked about (here) how I think language exchanges are probably the single most valuable thing you can do to learn a language because that's where you're actually talking to - and being corrected by - a native speaker, that's where the rubber meets the road....
Language Exchanges: Why Nothing Is More Essential in Learning a Language
The only way to learn to speak a language is to do so, horribly at first. That's it. Get it through your head, there's no getting around it. The only way to learn how to speak a language is to do so or, really, to try to do so, horribly at first while making lots of...
My E-book is now live! It took TWO YEARS, but I did it! Here’s what it’s about…
Wow. I can't possibly tell you how relieved I am that it's finally over (see that over there? that's my best "I'm so relieved" face, though it more looks like I've just become incontinent). I decided almost two years ago (January of 2011) that I needed to create my...
The Top 3 Easiest Languages to Learn for English Speakers
Hey guys, today we've got another guest post from Jeff at Living Bilingual, enjoy: Let me start off by acknowledging that finding the easiest language to learn is highly subjective, and that there is no one, clear-cut, hands down easiest language to learn....
