Hey guys, since I’ve starting posting frequently again I thought I’d bring back something I did a few times about six months ago and then stopped because I stopped posting altogether due to other commitments.  What I do is just post links to stuff that I’ve come across throughout the week that I think my readers might find useful, I’m primarily getting these from people whose blogs I read and who I follow on Twitter.  Let’s get started!

Spanish Playground – I think I may have mentioned this blog before, I’ve definitely tweeted about it a few times, but what this is is a website for people who teach Spanish to children.  Now, you know how enthusiastic I am about using language-learning material intended for children to help beginning adults learn the language (see my post Why You Should Use Kids’ Stuff immediately if you haven’t read it already!), and I would honestly say that 80-90% of the stuff she posts is fantastic for learning Spanish if you’re an adult at a beginning or intermediate level: it’s intended for a learner who’s at that level and it’s designed to be as fun and entertaining as possible…it’s designed for people with short attention spans, in other words, so I suspect it’ll be great for a lot of you, haha.

Most importantly, it’s fun.  A good bit of what she posts is probably a bit basic for me, but I still find myself doing them a lot of the time just because it is fun–things like songs or games, like today’s post on “guess the word” with a short video (do it! it’ll take you 30 seconds, tops, and it’s fun!).

The Spanish Blog – This is a blog run by Laura Garrido Eslava, a Spanish teacher from Bilbao in Northern Spain.  The real goldmine on this site is her free Spanish video lessons that contain a total of 270 video lessons (all free) and span Beginner, Intermediate, Upper-Intermediate, and Advanced levels in addition to a bunch of other things she’s done like her parallel text series (which I love) where she teaches you about various cities in Spain while using parallel texts (that is, the Spanish and its English translation are next to each other on the same page) and an audio reading of the Spanish to teach you Spanish. I just finished writing about this excellent series in the parallel texts section of my upcoming book.

I’ve recently taken up an interest in Spain; previously it was only Latin America that interested me, but after having just finished the fantastic Spanish-language movie that is Pan’s Labyrinth (that DVD comes with Spanish subtitles and is on sale for only $5.73 right now!), I became much more intrigued by the country and decided to look around a bit and see what was out there.  I’ve come across three blogs that I really like, they’re primarily about the country of Spain and only occasionally focus on the language but I’m certain I’ve got a good number of readers who are interested in traveling there so I’m definitely going to include them here:

1. My Spanish Adventure – Will moved to Spain from London back in 2011 for the express purpose of learning Spanish so his blog seems to be a bit more focused on the language than others.  Oh, and I also did a guest post for him a few weeks ago.

2. Kaley…& Más – Kaley is an American who initially went to Spain on a study abroad program in 2009 but fell in love with the country and then with one of its inhabitants–she is now engaged to a Spaniard and in the process of sorting out the wedding details as well as getting ready to move to Madrid with her fiance.

3. Spanish Sabores [“sabor” means “flavor or taste” so “Spanish Sabores” is “Spanish Flavors”] – Lauren is originally from Sutton, Massachusetts but spent some time in Spain teaching English where she met her new husband (check out her wedding photos, they’re fantastic, and OMG those shoes 😛 ).  They’ve decided to stay in Spain together and are moving to Madrid soon.  One of the focuses of her site is recipes, both Spanish and American, and I highly recommend you check them out if food and cooking interests you.

I tweeted this and just wanted to mention it here because I thought the concept of using video games to learn a foreign language was brilliant – it fits perfectly into my philosophy of using fun stuff that you enjoy to learn a language.  Check out Matt’s post on using Mass Effect to learn French over at Spanish-Only.

Ryan over at Ryan Goes Abroad published his plan on how he was going to learn Portuguese in a hurry before he left for Brazil – I thought that was very well put together and could definitely be adapted to nearly any other language.

I know I’ve mentioned them before and they’re in the sidebar, but I don’t think I’ve put Notes in Spanish in a Friday Linkfest…so I’m going to.  They have a ton of wonderful free lessons organized by skill level with Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced sections.  Absolutely something you should check out if you haven’t already.

A guest post by Wojtek over at Linguatrek concerning time management and the Pareto principle in the context of language-learning gave what I thought was a very good basic overview of the subject that I agree with: it really is all about baby steps.

Aaron at Every Day Language Learner did a great post on accountability that utilized my “consistent persistence” principle that I think everyone should read (the individual quoted in the first paragraph really knows his stuff, trust me 😉 ).

And lastly, just for fun, head on over to Omniglot real fast for something I thought was kind of funny: Queen’s English society throws in the towel (the society in Great Britain responsible for promoting the learning and usage of “the Queen’s English” has gone defunct due to lack of interest…I’m sorry but that’s just too funny).

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