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 via the contact form (or at andrew -at- traceylanguages.com). Let’s get started.
- SpanishLand School on YouTube. This is a channel I think I’ve mentioned elsewhere but I’ll do it here again. It’s a husband-and-wife team, the wife is Colombian, and they put out a lot of good content, and very consistently at that. I’ll post one of their most recent videos directly below so you can sample their content and see whether you want to subscribe to their channel or not. I’ve just realized that I wrote a post about them a month ago but screw it I’ll leave this here as I don’t think I promoted that post very much so hopefully not too many of you have already seen it (if you have, sorry, I’ve no affiliation with them, I just forgot I wrote that).
- Rompower. This is an Instagram account (you do follow me on Instagram, right?). She’s a Spanish journalist who posts common errors that native speakers make in Spanish, and then corrects them. She has totally figured out how Instagram works in that she always posts a really nice picture or video of herself, and then puts the actual Spanish lesson in the description. This is probably more for intermediate students and up, but even if you only know a little bit of Spanish you could probably still benefit from it even if you can’t understand a lot of what she says.
- Lyrics Training. Nifty idea, though be ready to type fast and rewind repeatedly (which is fine, it still works fairly well). The way it works is that you play a music video from YouTube that’s been embedded on their site (this is how they manage this without having to pay any royalties for the music, which allows them to offer this to you for free) and fill in the blanks in the lyrics that are shown below the video. How many blanks there are varies based on the level of difficulty you choose. It’s free and they offer a variety of languages including, of course, Spanish.
- Grimm Stories and Andersen Stories. These two sites offer all the original fairy tales by the Grimm brothers as well as those by Hans Christian Andersen in multiple languages, including English. This means what you can do is essentially treat it like a parallel text (this is traditionally a book meant for language students that is written in the foreign language on the left page and in the student’s native language on the right page). The way you do this would be to have the story you’re reading open in your target language in one tab and then also open that same story in your native language in another tab; you then use the version in your native language as a translation to help you understand the version in your target language.
- Newspaper Map. I know I’ve mentioned this site elsewhere but it’s been a while so a lot of you won’t have heard of it. It just lets you find all the newspapers in a particular city, region, or country by simply clicking and zooming on a map. Use this to find foreign language newspapers to help you learn your target language – it’s a lot easier and more intuitive than googling “Spanish language newspapers” or “Colombian newspapers” or something like that and then sorting through the results trying to find what you have in mind.
Ok I think that’ll do it for today. Be sure to check out previous editions of Friday linkfest for more recommended links of a similar nature (all are language-learning-related). Lastly…
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
