Learning Spanish Reviews - Learn Spanish with Andrew

A YouTube Channel You Should Check Out if You’re Learning Spanish: Spanishland School

Andrew — Thu, 04 Jun 2020 15:16:37 +0000

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 a YouTube channel I’ve had an eye on for a while: Spanishland School.

The channel is run by Andrea Alger, who is Colombian, and her American husband, Nate. The videos overwhelmingly feature Andrea since she’s the native Spanish speaker. I’ve kept a weather eye on them for a couple of years now and noticed how consistent they’ve been in putting out content and how the quality of that content has consistently increased. I’ve embedded one of their most popular videos about Colombian slang there below so you can have a look.

Beyond the videos, the actual service they seem to be offering is a monthly membership that gets you weekly group lessons and also includes some exclusive bonuses (podcasts, videos, transcripts, etc.). I have not sampled any of this and therefore cannot comment on it much beyond that, I’m mainly recommending their YouTube videos because they’re quite good for anyone in the A1-B1 stages (that’s complete beginner to low intermediate on the CEFR scale). They also have a free podcast called Españolistos you can check out and which I presume is available on the common podcast networks.

If anybody wants to add anything else about them you think is missing, if you’ve taken their courses or had other experience with them, please leave a comment. I hope that helps you and you have a good day (weekend’s almost here, just hang on a bit longer!).

Cheers,

Andrew

The post A YouTube Channel You Should Check Out if You’re Learning Spanish: Spanishland School appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

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)

Andrew — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 05:28:14 +0000

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 called Anki, it’s free) which you can use later to review your pronunciation and listening comprehension.

You’ll need to register for an account in order to be able to download files, it’s free and easy.

Once you’ve done that, go back to the homepage and now search for a word or phrase you want to hear pronounced. At this point Forvo has just about every word in existence for the most common languages of the world, and a lot of common phrases, expressions, and proper names of things. We’ll use the Spanish word, “aeropuerto”, for this example.

Now you’ll have the search results page. Frequently the same word appears in multiple languages, so you’ll need to select the result for the language you’re interested in. I have an arrow pointing to the one you’d want to click here for Spanish.

Notice that for each result you’re told (in the parentheses just to the right of each result) the gender of the speaker and which country they’re from. Our options here include both male and female speakers from Mexico, Peru, and Spain. This is useful if you want to focus on a specific dialect.

To download it, click the down arrow I’ve circled in red there.

Next you’ll want to open Anki (it’s an electronic flashcard program, if you’re not familiar with it see my article on Anki), go to the deck you want, and click add.

Lastly you’ll just drag and drop the MP3 file you’ve just downloaded into whichever field you want it in. Here I’ve made the obvious choice of writing the word on the front and having the audio file as the back of the card. What happens here is that you’re shown the front of the card (the word, “aeropuerto”, in this case) and then have to remember what’s on the back (the correct pronunciation of “aeropuerto”, in this case).

Please see the video I made for you below if any of this is unclear (it’s just me quickly demonstrating all of the above, it’s about a minute and a half).

I hope that was helpful, if you have any questions please leave them below. Also…

If you’re learning Spanish…

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.

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

The post 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) appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Español en 3000 Review: Latin American Spanish Podcast

Andrew — Thu, 22 Nov 2018 04:59:38 +0000

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 distinguishes it from other similar podcasts is that the conversations are entirely natural, not constructed. Most others in this genre have two people sit down and do a scripted conversation, one that’s engineered to teach a specific concept that day (e.g. possessive pronouns, gender and adjectives, the subjunctive, etc.). It’s also a (mostly) Latin American Spanish podcast, that is the overwhelming majority of the podcasts feature native speakers from Latin America, so if that’s the kind of Spanish you want to learn, this might be for you. They’re based in Medellin, Colombia, and so Colombian Spanish is featured more than any other type (especially the Paisa dialect). They do, however, make an effort to get speakers from other regions in order to provide listeners with a variety of dialects. So far, the dialects featured include: Argentinean, Bolivian, Colombian, Chilean, Cuban, Ecuadorian, Mexican, Iberian (Spanish from Spain), and Venezuelan. Note that you can select the one you want from the drop-down menu at the top where it says “Study by Accent”.

The basic product they’ve got here is very simple and easy to use, it’s just a podcast (a very good one, content matters more than anything), a good audio player with a really useful speed controler, a “mini lesson” at the end where they cover quite a substantial amount of material from the podcast, and a transcript of everything.

The Podcast

They talk about a variety of topics, generally trying to focus on a personal story involving one or some of the speakers, e.g. why someone moved to Medellin, how they fell in love with their spouse, etc. You can actually choose from a few general areas via the menu at the top; currently available are: aventuras (adventures), relaciones de pareja (romanctic relations between couples), negocios (business), and zambullida (literally “dive” or “diving”, refers here to diving into everyday situations, it’s kind of their “miscellaneous” category).

The Transcript

If you look at the screenshot of the beginning of one of their podcasts further down you can see just what one looks like: you have the audio player at the bottom (I talk briefly about it below), and a transcript in the middle where each speaker is clearly labeled and lines are separated so that it’s easy to follow along.

The audio player at the bottom of the screen follows you as you scroll down through the transcript, so there’s no need to scroll back up to try to find it in order to pause or adjust the speed.

The screenshot below is the beginning of one such podcast:

The Audio Player

I was impressed: it’s simple, it works perfectly on mobile (the whole site does, just pull it up in your browser, you don’t need an app for this podcast), and offers an excellent speed adjustment that allows you to speed up or slow down the audio. See below for a screenshot of me adjusting the speed (you just click the clock icon on the right hand side of the audio player to bring this up):

The Mini-Lesson

I’d say this is more a full-size lesson. It’s surprisingly comprehensive, they cover a lot of vocabulary, grammar, and slang used in the podcast.

The lesson itself is in audio format, in Spanish, and with a verbatim transcript for you to follow. Each topic gets a separate section within the lesson.

See the screenshot below to get an idea:

Conclusion

I lean more towards calling Español en 3000 a podcast for intermediate and advanced students than one for beginners, though advanced beginners (A2/B1 level) will benefit from it as well. Everything is in Spanish, though the fact that excellent transcripts are provided for all of that Spanish audio means that really anybody could use this.

I sort of feel like this is less a case of them competing with other, scripted podcasts (like SpanishPod101) and more a case of them filling a different niche, satisfying demand for something different altogether. Most students want to move on to working with natural conversations (and away from the scripted, dumbed-down-for-students stuff) as soon as possible, so this I think will find a lot of fans.

Is there a free trial?

Yes. They offer a 7-day free trial, just go here to their homepage to sign up. After that it’s just $15 a month if you pay monthly, or you can get lifetime access for $147.

Do I use it?

Yes! Actually, surprisingly, I do find myself listening to a conversation there every now and then. I was asked to review it by the founder (I actually met him in person in Medellin: Aussie, nice guy), and found myself genuinely interested in a lot of what they were talking about, partly because they were interesting conversations in general and partly because they talked a lot about Colombian and, specifically, Medellin culture and I was staying in Medellin at that time. I always learn at least a few new words and expressions (most native Spanish speakers not from the regions the speakers are from would find themselves doing that since local slang almost always gets used).

I you found that useful, don’t be afraid to leave a comment below or contact me.

Cheers,

Andrew

The post Español en 3000 Review: Latin American Spanish Podcast appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Finally: Affordable, Unlimited, Online Spanish Group Classes for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Students | GoSpanish Review

Andrew — Wed, 01 Mar 2017 01:21:59 +0000

I just finished trying a new service called GoSpanish and I’ll cut to the chase: flat rate of $35 per month for unlimited Spanish classes at four different levels with high-quality teachers, class sizes averaging 2-6 students, and which you can participate in from any device with internet (works on desktop, laptop, and smartphone – I tried all 3). DO IT.

A few more details…

Cost

The $35 per month is their cheapest plan (Silver) but even the cheapest plan gets you unlimited classes. I suspect they’ll change this in the future but those who get in on the original deal will probably be able to keep their original plan at the original price (in other words: they’re low-balling themselves, get in now). The two additional plans are at $59 and $79 per month and they merely get you some private classes (2/month and 4/month, respectively).

For those of you wondering how that compares with what you’d pay for a 1 hour class with a good tutor on iTalki: fear not, I have done the math for you. A good Spanish tutor on iTalki will run you about $10-15/hour, with GoSpanish going from the $35 plan to the $59 one gets you 2 private, 1-hour classes (with good teachers in my opinion) for an additional $24 (59 – 35 = 24), or $12/class. Pretty reasonable. If you go for the Platinum plan at $79/month, that nets you 4 private classes for an additional $44 (79 – 35 = 44), or $11/class–so a slightly better deal.

Honestly, that’s pretty good: that’s at the low end of what you’ll find on iTalki if you find a good teacher for that rate (you can, but you’ll likely have to try a few first). If you want private tutoring, the upgrade is probably worth the premium, yes. If you don’t, it’s not. You’re not going to do much better than $11-$12/hour anywhere else.

Classes

The classes are broken down by level and there are four of them: Beginner, Upper Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. “Beginner” is for people starting from scratch who speak absolutely no Spanish whatsoever, Upper Beginner is for those who are still beginners but can at least find their way around a bit (corresponding to A2 of the CEFR scale for those familiar). Intermediate and Advanced are the classes I took and I would place their Intermediate Class at B1 on the CEFR and their advanced class at B2 (you’ll be hard-pressed to find anybody running C1 or C2 level classes for any language outside of expensive tutors who specialize in teaching people to pass those exams). You need to be conversational if you’re going to take the intermediate or advanced classes.

There are 15 classes held per day by my count, each one is 1 hour long. That typically means 2-3 per day of each level, except Advanced. From what I saw there was only one Advanced class per day and it was the last one of the day at 8 PM my time (CST, I’m in Texas, so that’s 9 PM EST and 6 PM PST). I’ll post a screen shot of their class schedule below.

Teachers

The teachers were all very good by my measure, and I’ve got years of experience with dozens of tutors at this point. They’re all native speakers and all of the ones I had were Argentinean, for what that’s worth. They all spoke very clear, neutral, South American Spanish. None of them had the strong, stereotypical Argentinean accent (the “che”/”she” thing).

How It Works

The teachers have basic lesson plans and, at least at the intermediate and advanced levels, do an approximately 50/50 mix of exercises and casual conversation, which I think is just right. At the beginner level (I did not take a beginner class) there is probably more structure and less conversation simply because beginners don’t yet have a strong enough command of the language to hold a conversation for very long.

They make a point of calling on the students equally, in order, so that everybody gets about equal participation (unless you choose to merely listen in, which you can do).

The way the exercises function are basically as springboards into conversation about the subject they address, e.g. a recent session I did (which I have a video of) talked about estuaries in Argentina and the animals that inhabit them, which led to a discussion about wildlife and parks in both Argentina as well as in the places the students lived, so we all had an interesting discussion about that and learned not only some Spanish but also a bit about the different regions the teacher and students were located in like the everglades, alligators, and manatees in Florida where he lived (all of this was in Spanish, of course).

You start off by reading (the teacher has each student read a portion out loud, correcting any mistakes they make) about the topic of the day, in this case estuaries in Argentina:

Then you do some exercises together:

During this time things naturally diverge into normal conversation with the teacher guiding and directing as necessary. Like I said, it ends up being about 50% exercises and 50% spontaneous, natural conversation. I think this is the right way to do this: you do need some kind of outline for what to talk about otherwise you might have a lot of awkward fumbling, struggling to think of things to say, and consequently a lot of wasted time, but you don’t want to have a script that must be strictly adhered to either.

The conference call itself is done via Adobe Connect, which is free, and you just need to install it as either a plugin for your browser or app for your mobile phone. I took classes both ways (desktop computer and from my phone) and it worked perfectly each time.

Functionality (from my phone?! yes please!)

I tested it from my desktop, laptop, and phone (a Motorola Moto X running Android): it worked fine on all three. I was especially impressed with how well it ran on my phone. To me, that’s a real breakthrough because it allows students to massively expand where and when they can do a class. Check out the video below if you’d like to see me trying it out (it’s about 6 minutes, includes some observations and tips):

A few quick notes (I’ll save you some time if you don’t feel like watching the video)

It worked really well. No lag, I could hear them clearly and they could hear me clearly, it just worked. This seems like a big deal to me, that people can now take foreign-language group classes (small class size) from their phones. That makes this available to a lot more people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to find the time and opportunity to do it. It makes it much, much more convenient.
I had it on speakerphone and when I switched on my microphone it automatically went out of speakerphone mode and back into regular (?) phone mode such that I had to hold it up to my ear in order to hear. This may very well be a quirk that’s specific to my phone (Motorola Moto X, unlocked, Android) and, regardless, this would work better (and most people would do this) with earbuds or headphones of some sort, which would preclude this from happening in the first place, so it’s really irrelevant. Plus, it’s really not a problem even if it does happen, you just put the phone up to your ear when it’s your turn to talk.
You can easily read all the exercises and see all the buttons you need to press. There’s one to “raise” your virtual hand (signaling the teacher you wish to speak) and another to turn your microphone on and off – those are the two you’ll be using most.

Conclusion

Again, this all worked really well, I have very few criticisms. Perhaps they should consider having students test out to a certain level, that is make them take a placement exam to ensure people end up in the right classes (I mention why in the video: the people in the intermediate level classes, oddly, seemed more advanced than those in the advanced classes). I would say that they’ll really need to watch out for increasing class sizes as this gets more popular but that really shouldn’t be something that’s difficult to handle since there’s a glut of Spanish teachers available at the moment so they’re plentiful and cheap (cheapest language to learn via tutor on iTalki from what I’ve seen). This is likely due to Spanish being such a common language (main spoken language of 23 countries) and those countries where it’s spoken having a relatively low (relative to the U.S. and W. Europe) cost of living which means labor in general from those areas is going to be cheap.

I would also say I think they’re going to find themselves having to up their rates, but that’s just a guess ($35/month for unlimited Spanish classes seems unsustainable to me). So not only would I recommend you give them a try because they’re good but also because the price is probably going to go up in the future and you can likely lock in your monthly rate now if you’re interested in this type of service. Their website: GoSpanish.com.

Hope that helps, tell me what you think in the comments.

Cheers,

Andrew

The post Finally: Affordable, Unlimited, Online Spanish Group Classes for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Students | GoSpanish Review appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Glossika Review: A Supplement, But a Damn Good One

Andrew — Sun, 09 Oct 2016 23:53:58 +0000

Glossika is a course that’s gotten very popular recently and as such curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a try. That, plus I’m learning German (still as a beginner, I’ve had some lulls in my learning of it so I’m not as far along as I’d have liked) and I’m still at the stage where learning material like this can help. I bought the German version about six months ago and have been using it on and off since then. Here’s what I think…

Before I ever bought it I read reviews and the consensus I got was that it was definitely not a stand-alone course – meaning that you couldn’t get just Glossika and then learn the language entirely from that – or even really get a good grounding in the language just from Glossika alone. Even the company founder himself has said this. It’s not, and was never intended to be, a comprehensive course in the language. I agree with this. It’s a supplement to whatever else you’re using, but I’ll say it’s a fairly effective supplement if you use it consistently and do the whole course from beginning to end. This is a big “if” – why?

Boring?

I like it. It appeals to my personality and learning style. I don’t mind spending 30 minutes a day doing it. I can see the progress I’m achieving from it and that’s sufficient motivation for me to keep doing it, so it works for me. That said, it is a bit dry. I mean, all you’re doing is sitting there listening to an audio file (and occasionally checking the book when need be) to native speakers repeating sentence after unrelated sentence. That’s it. You’re not listening to a story, you’re not watching a movie (or getting any sort of visual stimulation at all for that matter), you’re not listening to any music. You’re just getting 10-12 minutes worth (it takes longer than that to get through it though, ~30mins for me the first time) of stuff like:

“Why are you looking at me?”
“Is the bus coming?”
“Are you watching TV?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Are you wearing a watch?”

And on and on. Mind you, those sentences were all sequential in the order you see above, only one (“No, I’m not”) has anything to do with the others.

How it works

That said, there’s a reason for this and a fairly sound one at that: the language you hear is carefully chosen to include only the most commonly communicated ideas in order of priority. That is, you get the most common (and therefore most essential) stuff first, then the next most common, then the next, etc. What you hear is ordered by how much you need to know it with the most common and useful aspects first. Note that I said “ideas”, not words. There are certain concepts that common in all languages, e.g. “Is ___ coming?” (“__” in their dialogue is “bus” but you learn that you can fill in anything else there you like), “Are you watching ___?”, “Are you wearing ____?”, etc.

Additionally, these concepts are repeated several times over the lessons using different dialogue so that they get embedded in your long term memory. Here, as many of you know, Glossika is making good use of spaced repetition, a very effective teaching technique.

The structure

The following is for those of you who really want the gritty details, but frankly if this just serves to confuse you don’t worry about it: using it is much simpler and easier than understanding precisely how they’ve structured it (which you don’t need to know, you just need to follow the directions included in the booklet, which are straight-forward, clear, and concise).

Glossika is being published, for the most part, in so-called “Fluency Modules”. One module contains 1000 bilingual sentences (with 3 modules in total, for a total of 3000 sentences). Each module is divided into three types of files: Comprehensible Input Audio (GMS-A), Interpretation Audio Training (GMS-B), and Target Language Audio Training (GMS-C). Don’t worry, it’s actually pretty simple:

In the “A” files you have the sentence in your native tongue repeated once, followed by the sentence in your target language repeated twice. For example, you could have English-Chinese-Chinese. When listening to “A” files, you are not expected to repeat after the speaker; just listen.
In the “B” files, you have the sentence in your native tongue repeated once, followed by a pause to let your say from memory the sentence in your target language, followed by the sentence in your target language repeated once. For example, you could have English-PAUSE-Spanish. When listening to “B” files, you are expected to repeat after the speaker.
In the “C” files, you only have the sentence in your target language repeated once. There is no translation.

The sentences included in each of Glossika’s three modules have been carefully selected to give you a wide range of expression. The sentences in Fluency Module 1, for example, target the kinds of conversations that you would have discussing day-to-day activities.

As an added bonus, when you purchase a Glossika package you get the “Glossika Spaced Repetition” (GSR) audio files together with the “Glossika Mass Sentence” (GMS) files. GSR files are a little bit less “ambitious”, shall I say, than the GMS files, because the sentences are repeated many, many times throughout the recordings, and so the pace overall is actually a bit slower.

If you’d like to learn more about it (or perhaps read a better explanation that mine), check out the following post on their blog: Glossika Mass Sentence Method.

Grammar? No

There’s no grammar instruction whatsoever. That fits this particular approach, I don’t think I’d want them to try to do any explicit grammar instruction, but some of you will definitely want grammar explanations and shall, therefore, have to look elsewhere for them…hence why I said this is a supplementary course. Same goes for if you want to do any serious reading or writing work in the language.

Which languages?

A lot. I won’t even try to list them all here, but if you want it they’ve probably got it. Definitely all the major ones (Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, Mandarin, etc.) save Portuguese – I was surprised not to see it on there and can’t really offer any explanation as to why, sorry.

What do I get and how much does it cost?

You get a bunch of audio files and a book in either physical softcover form or as a PDF file, your choice.

It typically costs between $99 and $249 depending on which package you want, and overall you get a lot of material (depending on how fast you go, you’re looking at 3-6 months to get through it all I’d say) and it’s a very effective system I think it’s a fair price (not cheap, but fair), so if you’re interested I highly recommend you go to their site, read the pitch, and check out which courses they offer.

Conclusion

It’s pretty good but you’ll definitely need to pair it with something else, e.g. the Telenovela Method or another course like Synergy Spanish (what I recommend for straight beginners). It’s also not cheap but most everyone who’s bought it seems to be happy so if you can afford it, I would (you can always refund it later if you don’t like it). I’d give it a 7/10 overall, all things considered. I’m not knocking it for being supplemental, that is for not being comprehensive, since it doesn’t claim to be and makes it pretty clear that is, in fact, a supplemental resource.

Hope that helps some people.

Cheers,

Andrew

The post Glossika Review: A Supplement, But a Damn Good One appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Benny Lewis’ Language Hacking (Italian) Course Reviewed

Andrew — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 03:54:02 +0000

This is to be a general review of the whole Teach Yourself Language Hacking course authored by Benny Lewis. Though the one I tried was the Italian course, they’re all structured pretty much the same and utilize the same method, so a review for one will cover the rest as well. In other words, regardless of which one you’re interested in (there are four at the moment: Spanish, French, German, and Italian), this review is for you.

I chose the Italian version of the course because that’s the only language I didn’t have any experience with whatsoever and I wanted you to be able to get the perspective of a complete beginner, especially since that’s who it’s intended for. That brings me to my next point: let’s cover what this course purports to do and what it doesn’t, what it’s objectives are and aren’t.

What is this course, and what is it not?

Neither this course nor the author claim or imply that they will make you “fluent”, let alone in any specific amount of time (e.g. three months). I say this because a common, and very unfair in my opinion, criticism of Benny and his products is that they “claim to make you fluent in three months” (they don’t), or that they imply they will (no). The name of his blog is, yes, Fluent in 3 Months. He has explained repeatedly that this is because of how long his language-learning missions tend to last (about three months) and that he usually achieves fluency, per his definition of the word (which I think is quite reasonable) and that definition roughly corresponds to the B2 level per CEFR or what I and many people call “conversational fluency”. It takes him, someone who’s spending 8-12 hours a day (because he does this full time, his job is to learn languages and then write about it), three months to achieve this level in most languages. That doesn’t mean you can in 30 minutes a day 3 times a week or something – come on.

So what does it do?

This course teaches you two things:

Conversational [Spanish/Italian/French/German]. This is a “conversation course”, as it’s called several times in the book (including the front cover), meaning that you learn from Italian conversations (they’re the heart of the course) in order to be able to make Italian conversation yourself. You learn how to “talk normally”, how to conduct common, everyday speech. Nothing too difficult, profound, obscure, or technical – just everyday conversation about common topics.
Language hacking. Benny teaches you how he goes about learning a language and all his little tricks and “hacks”. He demonstrates many of them for you by actually having you apply them to the language in question. From the first page of the introduction: “It’s [language hacking] simply about being smart with how you learn: learning what’s indispensable, skipping what’s not, and using what you’ve learned to have real conversations in Italian right away.”

The whole objective of the book is to get you speaking as soon as possible, per his mantra of “speak from day 1”. I generally agree with this: there’s no good reason not to do it, and speaking has several benefits including helping you better remember what you’re learning (far better than if you just read or listened to it) and working on your pronunciation, plus the only way to learn how to speak a language is, as I like to say, to do so, badly at first. This is really intended to be something to give you just enough of the language to be able to start having conversations with people in it via language exchanges or in the country where it’s spoken, from which point you would then really accelerate your acquisition of the language. This is a kick-starter, a method of getting you launched, giving you enough momentum for you to then be able to carry yourself and keep going on your own by continuously speaking to natives in the language (which will do more to help you learn it than anything else you could do).

So let’s dive in. Let me explain how I’m going to do this: I’m just going to have you come along with me as I go through the very first chapter (what are called “units”) in this book. I actually recorded everything I did as I did it, meaning that from the very start of the lesson the camera was rolling and I recorded every last minute that I spent working on Unit 1. Now, obviously, I’m not going to expect you to sit through all of that (it would be 2-3 hours worth of video), so I’ve just taken some highlights for each section and included them below.

Introduction

The only thing I’m including from the introduction is the pronunciation guide because that’s the only part of it that actually has you learning Italian. This was just a short guide to the pronunciation of Italian, describing how the written language corresponds to the spoken language (what you see is what you get, Italian is a phonetic language just like Spanish), and how to pronounce the vowels and consonants.

Here are the two pages in question, and then a short video of me using it and listening to and repeating after the audio as instructed:

Unit 1: Talking About Me

Each unit (chapter) has a “mission” around which it’s centered, the mission is what you’re going to have to do at the end of the chapter, the dialogue you’re supposed to make a video of you saying and then upload to the Teach Yourself Language Hacking site, where other people are supposed to help you by correcting your mistakes.

In this case, the mission is to make it through Italian customs. Specifically, you’re to tell the customs officer your name, where you’re from, where you live, why you’re coming to Italy, and why you’re learning Italian. (note: click to images below to see a larger version, every page from Unit 1 follows)

He emphasizes building scripts, which I strongly agree with for beginners, particularly those who have never learned a language before and are therefore bound to be a bit nervous and self-conscious the first few times they use their new language to actually communicate with another person. In this case, he’s helping you build a script for what is probably the most common topics of conversation you’ll encounter when you go to a country where your target language is spoken (why are you learning [Spanish/French/Italian/German]? where are you from? etc.). Let’s have a look at that first conversation:

Conversation 1

Cesco: “Melissa?”

Melissa: “Ciao. Sì, sono Melissa. E tu?”

Cesco: “Ciao e benvenuta a Roma! Sono Cesco.”

Melissa: “Grazie!”

Cesco: “Allora, parlami di te!”

Melissa: “Allora, sono americana. E sono una giornalista. Sono qui a Roma per studiare l’italiano. E tu?”

Cesco: Sono italiano, ovviamente! Sono insegnante di italiano. E vivo qui, a Roma.”

Ok. There’s the conversation, now what are we to do with it? Well first of all, read it and make the most of it you can, that is: say it out loud and, based on the pronunciation guide, try to pronounce it as close to correct as you can, and also try to discern what it means. Then, play the audio. I’d also like to note that, as you can see if you look at the image of the page above, there are several nifty little aside bonuses, e.g. the “Culture Tip” that describes Italian bars and how people socialize at them – I like that. Here’s a video of me doing the first conversation:

The Exercises

He’s included quite a wide variety of exercises based on the conversation, all of which require participation by the student and force you to learn via making mistakes, that is you have to do the best you can, then find out if you got it right. Very effective at getting you to remember the material (you’re much more likely to remember what you got wrong, and even what you got right if you didn’t know you were right when you said/wrote it). Oh, and yes, there is an answer key in the back for all of the exercises that require writing and have predictable answers (ones where you make up stuff particular to you obviously don’t have stock answers).

All of the say units will then have at least one of the following, though not all of these may be present for every single conversation (as such, some of the exercises below were based on Conversations 2 or 3 of Unit 1 but regardless you should be able to follow along and understand what’s happening and the point of it pretty easily):

Figure It Out

Next comes the “Figure It Out” exercise, which I particularly like because it forces you to guess and make mistakes. You’re supposed to fill in the blanks to simple questions asking you about what was said during the conversation and you’re to simply take your best shot at them, your best guess. Being wrong is encouraged (you learn from that!).

Here’s a short (~5min) video of me doing the exercise:

Notice

After this is a short review-and-confirm type of exercise, as I’ll call it, where you review the important words and phrases used in the conversation and confirm that they mean what you thought they did (no, you’re not just left to wonder if you were right forever). You’ll get a table of the relevant vocabulary – target language (Italian in my case) on the left and English on the right – and then a short set of exercises immediately after that will ask you how to say certain phrases in the language that you should be able to deduce from what you just learned, e.g. in the table above it says that “sono Melissa” means “I’m Melissa” and then one of the questions in the exercise below is, “How do you say the following in Italian…a) I am _______”. Well, if “sono Melissa” means “I’m Melissa”, then obviously “sono” means “I am”. You’re not just handed the answers in the table above – nearly so but not quite – you have to deduce them, and I like that…makes you work.

Pronunciation

After the “Notice” exercise will come either a “Grammar Explanation” or “Pronunciation” explanation and exercise, sometimes both. In these he simply explains some very limited (they’re always short so as to not overwhelm you) aspect of the pronunciation or grammar of your target language that was just used in the preceding conversation (so it’s always immediately relevant stuff). In this case we have a pronunciation explanation of “i” and “u” in Italian accompanied by an audio file and then a practice exercise with its own audio file:

Here’s me doing the pronunciation section and its practice exercise:

After that he emphasizes the importance of having a good dictionary for your target language so that you can learn to say whatever it is you what to be able to say (he calls this building “me-specific” vocab, which I agree with – stuff that’s personal to you is far more interesting and memorable). Then he has you do a couple exercises that force you to look up words because they haven’t been provided yet (e.g. I had to look up how to say “author” in Italian, which is “autore”):

Put It Together

Here he has you put together (hence the name) everything you’ve learned til now to build your “script”, that is what you’ll need to be able to say to complete the final mission at the end of the unit (chapter). In this case you have to say your name, where you’re from, what you do for a living, and where you live. See the bottom part of the above image for this.

Language Hacks

These are essentially valuable short-cuts he’s found that work for the language in question or languages in general, e.g.

Use of cognates (p10). Italian, Spanish, French, and German all have thousands of words that are similar or identical to the same words in English, such as “pilota” (pilot) or “associazione” (association) in Italian, and he doesn’t just tell you this but also gives you rules for finding them, such as words ending in ‘-tion’ in English will frequently be cognates in Italian that end in ‘-zione’, such as “associazione” or “opzione”.
Mnemonics and memory tricks in general (p28), e.g. basic association techniques such as thinking of the Beetle’s song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds to remember that “la luce” means “light” in Italian.
Sounding more fluent with conversation connectors (p130), e.g. “francamente” (frankly speaking), “anche se” (even if), “se ho capito bene” (if I understand correctly).

After each of these will be an exercise where he has you use the hack. Here’s the one from Unit 1 that teaches you to use cognates in order to quickly expand your vocabulary:

And here’s a short video of me learning the hack and then doing the exercise:

Grammar Explanations

These are short, only-absolutely-essential explanations of basic grammar. He’s really tried very hard to keep the formal, traditionally “boring” grammar lessons out of this course, but inevitably you must teach some. Some examples include:

If a word (singular) ends in -o or -e, the last vowel changes to -i in the plural, e.g. “un giorno” (one day) becomes “due giorni” (two days).
What the command form (imperative) is, how to use it, and how to conjugate verbs into it.
Forming the past tense, in this case (p139) by using the easiest to learn method where he just teaches the student to say the conjugated version of “avere” (to have) plus the past participle, e.g. “I finished” = “Ha finito” (literally “I have finished”).

Here’s one from Unit 1 that I did where he teaches the simple (and very useful) “verb + noun” sentence structure:

And here’s a video of me doing it:

Conversation Strategy

Here he gives you basic strategies you can use in real-life spoken conversations, such as:

Smoothing out your sentences with connector words like “and”, “or”, and “because”.
Important “survival phrases” like “How do you say…?”, “Slower please”, “I’m sorry”, “I don’t understand”, “Can you repeat that?”, “One moment”, and “I can’t hear you.” For what it’s worth, this, in my opinion, is really valuable – you need to know how to say these things (you’ll use them a lot).
Learn set phrases for each stage of the conversation, e.g. “Quanto tempo!” (it’s been a while) for the beginning, “Ultimamente sono stato…” (lately I’ve been) to help lead the conversation, and “E come lo trovi?” (and how have you found it?) to extend it further.

Here’s one I did from Unit 1 where I had to learn how to use connector words properly:

And here’s a video of me doing it:

The Mission (end)

Finally, at the end of each unit, after you’ve done three conversations and all their accompanying exercises (covered above), you’ll have a “mission” to complete where you’ll have to actually used what you’ve learned to create a video that you’ll then upload to the Teach Yourself Language Hacking site where, hopefully, other people will evaluate it and help you. My mission at the end of Unit 1 was, as stated at the beginning, to get through Italian customs by:

say your name and occupation using “sono”
say where you’re from and where you live using “sono” and “vivo”
say why you’re visiting Italy using “perché”/”mi piace”/”adoro”
say why you’re learning Italian with “voglio imparare…perché…”
use connector words along the way to sound a bit more fluent!
Write down your script, then repeat it until you feel confident

After having made and memorized your script, you make a video of you speaking it. I opted not to look up anything I wasn’t sure about so that I ran the risk of making some mistakes and gave people something to correct in my video. Here’s my video of me completing the mission:

Lastly he encourages you to speak to other people in the language hacking community by viewing their videos and asking at least three follow-up questions (based on what they said) in Italian.

My Evaluation

I think overall this is an excellent (especially for the price: ~$20US) introductory course for beginners whose priority is speaking the language in normal conversation. The free audio (all of which use native speakers) is a massive bonus that really makes a huge difference in how useful this book is – without the audio it’s a supplementary course at best, with it it’s an entire introductory speaking course by itself. The wide variety of exercises (and the fact that all of them require the student to apply what they’ve just learned in many different ways) means that you never really get too bogged down in one particular thing (vocab or grammar or language hacks or whatever) and are always moving on to new things to do after a relatively short time. You can tell he’s really tried to make this as personal for the student (“me-too” language you create yourself) and interesting (lots of cultural notes about the countries the language is spoken in) as possible.

I have one definite criticism, and it’s actually of the audio of all things: they don’t give you enough time to repeat after the speaker, you end up having to pause it after each sentence in order to do so. It would be a dawdle to just insert a few extra seconds of blank space after each phrase/sentence by the native speaker where the student can repeat after them. It was easy for me to just hit the space bar and pause it while doing the audio at my computer, but for somebody listening to it in their car or on their phone while walking it might not be quite so easy. Also, in the audio, I would continually remind the student to repeat after the native speaker (that is so important) for maybe…the first half-dozen tracks or so, just to make sure they get in the habit of doing it. Lastly, I’d consider having the native speakers follow this format:

Say the sentence at full speed, normally.
Repeat it again slowly (maybe 1/2 speed).
If there are any particularly tricky words you know native English speakers are likely to have trouble with, have the native speaker repeat them even more slowly, syllable by syllable, then again quickly a couple of times (with space after each instance for the student to repeat after them).

In other words: just go listen to something by Pimsleur and then do that. I’m spoiled by Pimsleur, no other audio course has come close to doing it as well as they do.

I should say, to be fair, this is a really minor complaint, more of a suggested adjustment, considering that the course is twenty bucks and the audio is entirely free (Pimselur is ~$250 per level, and there are typically four levels per language). But I feel like I have to pick on something, so there you go.

In summary, if you’re someone who’s more interested in learning how to speak the language conversationally than anything else (this is 80% of language learners), and especially taking price into account, I’d give this a 9/10. It’s a great beginner’s introductory speaking course.

Cheers,

Andrew

The post Benny Lewis’ Language Hacking (Italian) Course Reviewed appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish from Garfield! Spanish Garfield Comics Now Available as E-book and Paperback

Andrew — Wed, 07 Sep 2016 03:20:17 +0000

I was contacted some months ago by the publisher of this, Amp Comics (check out their site there, they have other similar stuff if you like this), who had seen my post about learning Spanish from comics and knew I was a Garfield fan (have been since I was about 7 or 8, easily my favorite comic), and wanted to send me a couple copies for review. I said “sure, go ahead” and have been meaning to write something up for a few months now because it’s something I know a lot of people would like, it’s very much “what you see is what you get” (it’s just…Garfield comics in Spanish, that’s it), and it’s quite affordable (about $7 on Amazon for either the paperback or e-book).

Now, as I mentioned in that post of mine above that I linked to, you can read tons of (Spanish and English) Garfield comics online for free at GoComics.com, but I really like having a physical paperback version of most books and this is definitely one of them. First of all, comics don’t work well in an e-book format for numerous reasons: differing screen sizes and resolutions means they’ll display properly on some people’s devices and not others, the comics in this book are all in color and many e-readers are black-and-white only, and it’s just nice to have a physical copy to hold in your hands many times. Some books are actually better as e-books, however this is not one of them (to be fair, I haven’t viewed the e-book version so I don’t know how good/bad it is but I know it won’t look as nice on my black-and-white Kindle as it does in color hard copy in front of me).

So far I’m perfectly happy with my copy in terms of the physical quality of it: color, pictures, alignment, paper weight, durability, etc. are all very good. I’ve been reading it for several months and it’s held up just fine (no pages falling out, no spine failure, etc.).

As I noted in my post about using comics in general, they’re typically great for beginners (or those of us more advanced but who don’t want to exert a lot of effort e.g. at bedtime) because they use very simple language, are short, and funny. Plus, there are several pictures per comic which act as visual memory aids with which you’ll associate any new words you learn – Spanish in the context of a funny comic (or movie or TV show, which is why I wrote a book about how to learn Spanish using such things) is much more likely to be remembered than Spanish in the context of a textbook or mere flashcard or something. Context matters.

Anyway, I just thought I’d quickly share this with you as it’s something I thought some of you would like and it’s very cheap if you want it. Let me know what you think! 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:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Learn Spanish from Garfield! Spanish Garfield Comics Now Available as E-book and Paperback appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Fantastic Source of Free Online Spanish Videos (some with subtitles!): RTVE.es

Andrew — Sat, 03 Sep 2016 00:44:03 +0000

RTVE is Spain’s state-owned corporate television station, very similar to the BBC in the U.K. or PBS here in the U.S. They’re the largest and most popular broadcaster in Spain, and they show a wide variety of news, documentaries, fictional dramas, reality shows, etc. Since they’re state-funded, there’s no profit motive and therefore less motivation on their part to restrict who can watch their products, from where, and through which medium. Consequently, their website, RTVE.es offers a lot of material that’s all in Spanish and free to view by anybody, anywhere in the world.

It should be noted that not all of their videos can be viewed outside Spain, but many of them can. It seems that, with the exception of news, the more recent a show is the more likely it is to not be available outside Spain.

News

What I’ll recommend first and foremost is the news show Telediaro. There are usually several segments per day, and most of those will include Spanish subtitles (intended for the hearing impaired, but we know who else they’re useful for!) you can activate in the bottom right corner of the video screen. It should be noted, however, that if you want the subtitles you’ll probably have to wait a day or two for them (a human has to

do them manually, which is a good thing because it means they’re done right, machine translation is still a long way from being as good). So if you want the subtitles, pick a show from a couple days ago, if you don’t care and want the latest news then choose the most recent transmission.

Personally, what I’m really fond of is the daily morning show Los desayunos (it’s kind of a summary of current news with the added bonus of an interview segment at the end that’s about 20-30 minutes long). This one also includes Spanish subtitles, however you’ll have to wait a couple days for them just like with the above.

Documentaries

Additionally, they offer a ton of great documentaries, which you can see via the preceding link or by clicking “Documentales” in the menu at the top of their site. All of the ones I’ve seen so far include a transcript (verbatim of what’s said) on the right hand side of the video screen (note that you can click on a piece of dialogue there and it’ll skip the video to it). The thing with these is that they’re not all available outside of Spain. What I think the pattern is here, is that all the more recent stuff (3 months? 6 months? I have no idea, something like that) is restricted to

people in Spain and then once it ages beyond that point they open it up to everyone. So, in other words, look for shows that are at least 6-12 months old and those will almost certainly be available.

One I’m watching right now that’s a lot of fun (and available to everyone and has Spanish subtitles) is Los colores del jamón (“The colors of the ham”), which is about jamón in Spain.

Drama

You can view these by clicking ‘Television’ in the top menu or just going here. As you can see they have quite a lot available.

Two that I’m partial to are Isabel and Carlos, Rey Emperador, both historical fictions (I like those because you learn a lot of Spanish history while you’re at it). Both of these offer Spanish subtitles, though again the same thing I said above about the more recent episodes not being available outside Spain yet seems to apply here as well.

Other

I’m really not into reality shows so I can’t comment on those, but I do know that Masterchef, for one example, is extremely popular in Spain right now.

They have a whole area called Recetas (“recipes”) for you cooks out there. Note the little menu at the top where it says “Recetas Programas” – “recetas” are just the recipes (you can have Google Translate help you out by just coping and pasting the URL into Google Translate and it’ll translate the whole page for you, or even better you can use Readlang to learn

some Spanish while you’re at it), whereas “Programas” are actual TV programs.

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:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Fantastic Source of Free Online Spanish Videos (some with subtitles!): RTVE.es appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Memrise vs Anki: Is Either Better? No, Just Different (and for a different application).

Andrew — Sat, 20 Aug 2016 03:22:54 +0000

Anki vs Memrise

As many of you know – and many of you are as well – I’m a big fan of Anki. People have bugged me about Memrise for years now and, although I’ve used it a fair bit, I’d never gotten around to writing a proper review of it, so I thought I would by comparing it with its obvious rival and answering a question many ask: Anki or Memrise? I particularly thought this was a good idea when I came to the point that I realized each one is better than the other at certain things.

If you’re primarily going to be making your own cards, Anki is what you want (or will want to use for that particular purpose). If you’re a beginner and primarily interested in just getting a good, quick start in the language by using already available material, Memrise is what you want.

Anki is just a lot easier to create new cards in, that’s what it was designed for, so that’s what it’s particularly good at. Yes, you can download other people’s decks and use them via Anki’s website, but Memrise just executes this idea so much better.

I’ll give you an example: I’m still working on my Spanish but I’m at a fairly advanced level (high B2 / low C1) so I just never use Memrise for Spanish, it’s useless to me for that purpose, but I’m only at about A2 in German right now so I find Memrise to be very useful and effective, as well as enjoyable to use, so therefore I use it almost daily (for German).

Please note that you can click the below images to see a larger version.

Quick Summary of What Anki Does

It’s simple: you want to make a flashcard, so you tell Anki that and write whatever you want the front and back of the card to be (in this case as an example we have “to be” on the front and “ser” on the back):

and then you review it later…

…where you’ll tell Anki how well you know it (note buttons at the bottom):

and that’s it. Anki then calculates, based on your answer, how many times you’ve reviewed it, and how often you get it right, when it’ll show it to you next (this is known as spaced repetition and is an extremely effective memory technique). I’ve got cards that only come up once every 6 months or year even. Simple (more detail on Anki here if you’re interested).

You can, by the way, add images and audio recordings to your cards, but you have to do this yourself (you have to hunt down the images and audio recordings and then add them manually). Memrise (usually) has this taken care of for you.

How Memrise Works

With Memrise you select a course…

…and then simply start learning it. They’ve already been put together for you (by the community, by other users).

You get all manner of exercises…

Basic vocabulary:

Note the arrows to the left and the right of the image, those allow you to scroll through whatever images other users have uploaded. If one of them satisfies you, you can select it as the “mem” to associate with this word or phrase (in the above case, “erzählen”). I didn’t like the first image you see above, so I scrolled through until I found and selected this one:

If you don’t see one you like, you may upload your own as I did in the example below.

Note how it says just above the picture “You have chosen this mem”. Well, you can choose images – visual reminders to help cue the word in your memory called “mems” in this case – to go along with each of your vocabulary cards. In this case I wasn’t happy with what was already on offer so I found this one via Google Image search by searching for “French people”.

This is what gives this site it’s name and much of its popularity: you can use any visual image you like to remind you of the answer. You can choose one from those that other users have uploaded (and even vote on them, note the little thumbs up sign in the bottom right of the first two images above) or upload your own as I’ve done in the last.

Select the correct audio:

You get three audio files that you can play, one of which will play the phrase written above (“the health” in this case), which you then select for the correct answer.

ID what you hear:

In this case you hear an audio recording and must select what you heard from several choices.

Translate by selecting the correct words:

This is a translation that’s fairly easy because it’s multiple choice (sort of): you just have to pick the right words and put them in the right order. It gets tougher later when you’ll have to…

Write the sentence entirely from memory (you’re given the English and expected to translate, to German in this case):

Note the little pie-chart-looking-thing in the upper right: that’s a count-down timer. Yes, you only have a certain amount of time to get each card right when reviewing it.

When you get it wrong…

In the above exercise I had to translate by writing and I got it wrong. What it does in this case is tell you (that you got it wrong), tell you what the correct answer is (“Franzosen lieben es über Essen zu reden”), what you wrote (“Franzosen lieben es über Essen reden”), and then give you an opportunity to do it right by writing it correctly.

I think that last part is really important and something that definitely sets it apart from Anki: you’re not just told you got it wrong, you’re immediately given a chance to do it correctly, and not only that but by actually recalling and physically writing (typing) it out. Recall is more powerful (better at forcing memorization) than recognition is, and physically having to write something rather than just thinking or saying it out loud is better still.

Good job, Memrise.

Your score:

When you’ve finished a review or learning session you’re given all sorts of useful stats like how many correct answers you got, how many points this earns you (yes, you’re ranked relative to other people to encourage a bit of competition!), what your accuracy rate was, etc.

A Demonstration of Memrise in Action (video)

Here’s a quick video I did for you guys of me learning German with Memrise, it’s unedited, a little under 5 minutes long, and covers a whole lesson:

Which One I’d Recommend

They both do different things better than the other, so it really depends on what your needs are. If you’re a rank beginner and you’re not learning lots of new vocab from other sources (like TV shows or movies if you’re doing the Telenovela Method, which you should be, ahem), then just use Memrise. If you’re more advanced and at this point you really don’t need any basic or even intermediate courses (like if you’re at least B1 level or better, roughly), then I’d say just stick with Anki.

If, however (and this is the most likely one for you), you’re a beginner/intermediate who can take advantage of one of the pre-made courses Memrise offers and you’re learning additional vocab, phrases, and grammar from other sources like music videos, TV shows, comics, or newspapers, then you’ll want to use both. They’re both free and they’re both very, very useful for the average language learner. Like I said, I use Anki for Spanish and both Anki and Memrise for German since I’m at a fairly advanced level with my Spanish but a fairly novice level in German.

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:

Cheers,
Andrew

The post Memrise vs Anki: Is Either Better? No, Just Different (and for a different application). appeared first on Learn Spanish with Andrew.

Learn Spanish Vocab Fast with this Fantastic Free Tool

Andrew — Sun, 14 Aug 2016 18:29:47 +0000

The tool in question is ReadLang, it works with any website in a variety of languages, and makes the process of learning new words from online text much easier than it was before, saving you massive amounts of time and effort. You click the word you don’t know, it automatically looks it up, gives you the definition, and then stores the word into your flashcard deck for later review (via ReadLang’s website). Below I’ve demonstrated this with my preferred Spanish-language newspaper, El Heraldo:

Click to see a larger version.

The only thing you have to do is sign up and install the web reader, which is merely some javascript that you bookmark and then go to once you’re on the page you want to start using ReadLang on (they give you better instructions when you sign up, don’t worry).

Great built-in flashcard/SRS tool

Once you’ve signed up and installed the Web Reader, you can just go to any website in Spanish (or any other language) and when you see a word you don’t know, just click it – doing this automatically adds it to your ReadLang flashcard deck along with the definition for it and the original sentence that it was used in. The flashcard system is just like Anki so it handles the timing of what should be reviewed and when based on how well you know it. You no longer have to manually copy the word into Anki, look up its definition, put the definition into Anki along with the context it was used it, and then save it. ReadLang does all this for you. Here’s the flashcard system in action:

Notice how the original context is included at the top. You click the blue box with the question mark to reveal the answer and then indicated how well you knew it, just like Anki:

Shows you front and back automatically

One of the really nice things about it is that it automatically flips the cards for you and tests you on both sides, meaning that you’re shown the Spanish and English equally often, 50% of the time you’ll get the Spanish word and have to know the English and 50% of the time you’ll get the English and have to know the Spanish. With Anki and most other flashcard/SRS’s you have to manually do this yourself and each and every card and it’s very tedious. You can see this below where it’s flipped the above card and showed me the English, “highway”, and I have to know that the Spanish word for that is “carretera”, whereas before it showed me “carretera” and I had to come up with “highway” to get it right:

Progress report and list of words you reviewed that day

Lastly, it provides you with a chart detailing your progress (you can see I’ve been negligent of late, I need to get back to this but I’ve been working more on listening comprehension recently) as well as a list of all the words you reviewed that day:

Conclusion

This is a wonderful little tool, largely in its simplicity and ease of use. It does precisely what a ton of people have wanted for years now and nothing more, it merely does that and does it well. Again, you can check it out at ReadLang.com.

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:

Cheers,
Andrew

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