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

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

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

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

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

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

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:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

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:

• Amazon
• iBooks (the iTunes store)
• Kobo
• Barnes & Noble
• Google Play Store
• Goodreads
• Scribd
• Ciando

Cheers,
Andrew

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 work, so all I have to say now, regrettably, is that what you probably want instead is a language exchange (click here to read my article on them and find out where/how to do them).

If I find some chat rooms in the future I’m willing to recommend, I’ll come back and revise this post.

Sorry,

Andrew

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 (written/spoken by native speakers) of it being used so you can see how to do so properly.

Well, here is that thing: Reverso Contexto.

It’s very simple: you enter any word in any language (note that you can change them around as you like in the menus at the top) and it gives you examples from various sources along with the translation in whatever language you choose.

The link above takes you to the Spanish-English page, so it’s expecting you to give it a Spanish word or phrase and then it will show you real-life examples of that word or phrase being used along with the English translation of each one.

Note that clicking the “reverso” button in between the two languages switches them.  So if it was Spanish-English before, clicking that switches it to English-Spanish which lets you search for English and then gives a translation of what it finds in Spanish.

To actually hear words and phrases spoken aloud by native speakers, head on over to Forvo – fantastic site, I use it all the time.  Note that if you register for an account you can then download recordings, which can be inserted into Anki cards, something I find very useful.

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

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 answers.  You have questions about their language, their culture, their countries, and they have questions about yours: you help each other out (so no, it doesn’t cost money to use), you help them in exchange for them helping you.  It works just like a language exchange except what you’re exchanging is not practice with each other in your respective native languages that each of you are learning, but instead information about the language and culture in question.  The most popular type of questions on the site currently are “Does this sound natural?” and “What does ___ mean?”.

But you could use a language forum (like WordReference) for this…

Yes, you could, but for a lot of people that means having to register and do all that rigamarole (maybe you have to make X number of posts or you have a probationary period or you have to wait for an admin to approve your account, etc.), plus forums like that aren’t just for questions like that but language-learning information in general.  Additionally, a lot of people don’t want to (it’s considered bad etiquette) make a whole new post just to ask what a particular word or phrase means or how to say a single word or phrase.  Lastly, people on a forum have no incentive to answer your question, here they do.

For asking quick, individual questions about specific things and getting an answer in a very short period of time (I tested it and had an answer to my question in under 2 hours, I talk about this below), this is what you want.  It does one thing and does it very well, it perfectly meets this particular (high-demand) need.

Ok, walk me through it! How does this work?

Step 1: Get an Account

First, you register an account.  You can do this with an e-mail address or use an existing account that you have with Lang-8, Twitter, or Facebook.

This is necessary because for this to work you have to some kind of standard that you hold people to (you have to contribute in order to take) otherwise you’ll end up with a whole bunch of leeches and a few people helping here or there and a much less efficient system.  So, you have an account that shows the number of questions you’ve asked, the number you’ve answered, how many “likes” you’ve gotten, and how many “featured answers” (your answer was selected as the best) you have.  “Likes” and “featured answers” tell people how good you are at answering people’s questions which affects how likely they are to help you out when you need it.  It works very similar to Lang-8 who, by the way, own this site.

Step 2: Ask and Answer Questions, That’s It!

Once you’re registered and signed in you’ll see on the homepage the latest questions asked about whatever you said your native language was:

Clicking on any one of these will expand it and allow you to answer the question:

In the above case, since the question was “Is this natural?”, you have four options to choose from plus, further down, you will have a text box where you can post additional information to explain your choice and give them advice (such as how to make it sound more natural in this case).  It works similarly with other types of questions.

If a question has already been answered satisfactorily and you don’t think you can do any better, you can just give their answer a virtual thumbs up and move on (you could of course give an answer a thumbs up and then add your own anyway).

To ask a question, just click the big “Ask” icon in the top center of every page and you’ll be taken to the following form:

Where you can choose from one of three common questions – “How do you say this?”, “Does this sound natural?”, and “What’s the difference?” – or make up your own question to ask (you can ask anything, no you’re not restricted in any way).

Once you’ve posted your question you’ll be notified by the little “Notifications” icon in the top menu bar changing to show you that you’ve got a new notification of some sort (somebody answered your question, one of your answers was featured, etc.).  Click on it and you’ll be taken to your notifications area where you’ll see any new answers or other activity you’ve gotten.

What happened when I tried it

It worked!  It worked perfectly and quickly.  I posed the question “What’s the difference between ‘Ducha’ and ‘Regarderazo’?” – both of these words mean “shower” in Spanish, but I didn’t know what the difference was.  I got my answer:

Apparently “regarderazo” is more of a slang term, probably specific to Mexican Spanish (what I suspected given the source), whereas “ducha” is a more formal, universal term, though they both mean the same thing.  I heard the word “regarderazo” in the movie, Ladrón Que Roba A Ladrón, which features almost entirely Mexican Spanish and which I highly recommend by the way (fun movie, correct verbatim Spanish subtitles and English subtitles, and you’ll learn lots of slang and a few curse words, too), and I learned it meant “shower” but always wondered what the difference between it and “ducha” was since “ducha” was by far the more common term I had always heard used.  Now I know!

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

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 it, this is what you want: it’s effective (native speakers correct your writing for you!), it’s free, and it’s fun and interesting since you can write about whatever you want (I like doing goofy made-up stories, personally).  It’s called…

Lang-8 (this is a link to their site, open it in another tab and keep reading)

and here’s what it is and how to use it…

Lang-8 is essentially a written language exchange or, to put it another way, a modern electronic pen pal sort of setup.  If you know what either of those things are then you basically already get the gist.  The way it works is that you’ve got a bunch of registered users who are all native speakers of various languages (English, French, Spanish, Swahili, whatever) and who are all learning various other languages.  So you end up with a situation where there are other users who are native speakers of whatever language it is that you’re learning (unless it’s something really obscure).  Now, you write whatever it is you want to write in the form of what they call a “journal entry” (write a made-up story like I do, talk about your day, comment on a recent news story, whatever you want to do) in the language that you’re learning, publish it, and native speakers of that language will come and correct it for you because…why, you ask?

Because you’re doing the same thing (not necessarily for them, Lang-8 uses a currency system so that’s unnecessary, thankfully), that’s why: quid pro quo.  What I mean is that you get what are called “L points” for correcting other people’s journal entries (that are written in your native language, which is the language they’re learning) and the more L-points you get the more likely they will be to get corrected (and the more people they’re likely to be corrected by: it’s great to have multiple points of view, it really is).  Native speakers of language X who are learning language Y correct the writings of people learning language X in exchange for native speakers of language Y doing the same for them.  Make sense?  Your native language is English, let’s say (probably is), and let’s say you’re learning Spanish: you correct the journal entries of people trying to learn English because this gets you “L points”, you then write your own journal entry in Spanish and publish it, which is listed at the top of the homepage of all the native Spanish speakers on the site, several of whom see it and, wanting to earn some “L points”, correct it for you.  Whew.  Got it now?  It’s not complicated but it is a pain in the ass to explain.

Step 1: Get an Account

It’s easy, just register with them (for free) with a valid e-mail address, just like any other site requiring registration.  It’s understandable why they require user accounts since the whole currency system wouldn’t work without it, plus people can see your overall stats that will tell them how good you are about returning the favor and that acts as a sort of credit rating for you.

All you have to do is provide is an e-mail address, pick a nickname, choose a password, and tell them what your native language is and what language you’re learning.  Also note that you can just register using your Facebook or Twitter account if you’d prefer to do that.

Step 2: Correct Some People’s Journal Entries (get L points!)

You don’t need to do much and it won’t take long, really, maybe 5-10 minutes or so, but you need to establish some credit on the site before you can reasonably expect anyone else to do corrections for you.  It doesn’t matter what their native language is (no, it doesn’t need to be the one you’re learning, that’s the beauty of a currency system like this) just so long as you speak the language they’re learning that their journal entry is in.

Now, look at the top menu bar: there are two big blue buttons, one of them says “Correct” – click that.

You’ll be automatically matched – based on what you said your native language was – to people who need your help.  The entries you see will be ordered by a combination of how recent they are (you probably won’t get anything more than a few hours old) and by how good that person’s “credit” is, so to speak, which is largely based on how many “L points” they have.

You’ll get a page listing the latest journal entries that need correction and which are in your native language:

You can also change around how the entries are sorted yourself if you like: note the presence of the “Latest Entries” and “Popular Entries” tabs at the top where they’ll be sorted by how recent or popular they are.

Now select one to correct.  Once on the entry’s page you’ll have the whole entry at the top so you can just read straight through it first if you like, and then if you scroll down you’ll first see any other users’ corrections that you can refer to if you want, and then below those will be the interface where you can do your corrections.  The entry is broken down into sentences so that you can correct each sentence individually and it allows you to correct the sentence by editing it any way you want and making letters or words red, blue, bold, strike-through, or gray (there’s a guide that will tell you more specifically how to do corrections if you’re interested, plus clicking the blue button at the top that says “Go to the corrections tutorial” will give you a short on-page tutorial).

Once you’ve finished just click the big orange “Post corrections” button.

Step 3: Write A Journal Entry

Again, just look at the top menu, find the big blue “Post” button, and click that.  Write whatever you want, I prefer to make up stories myself.

***Really useful tip!***

Use vocabulary that you’ve recently learned in your journal entries.  Make a point of building the entry around the words you want to use in it, let them dictate what you write.  The important thing is to actually use them.  Not only does this do a great deal to embed them into your long-term memory so you don’t forget them or what they mean, but it also gets you to genuinely learn the word (not just memorize its definition) by forcing you to use it in-context, in actual communication intended for a native speaker, a native speaker who will shortly come along and review it for you, saying “yes, this is right, that’s how you use that word”, or “no, that’s not right, that’s not how you use that word”, and if it’s not right they will then say “ok, here’s how to correctly say what you’re trying to say” – do you see how immensely valuable that is?  You really learn how to use the word.

Ok, moving on…

Also note that when you’re creating a new entry you’ll have the option of providing a translation in your native language of what you wrote so that if the person correcting it happens to speak that language as well then it can really help them figure out what it was you were trying to say, e.g. if you’re a native English speaker learning Spanish and the native Spanish speaker correcting it happens to also speak English, having that English translation of it there for them can really help them out if your Spanish is particularly bad and they can’t determine, just from it, what you’re trying to say, the meaning you’re trying to convey.  I think that’s very cool and very well thought-out.

Also note that you can change the access settings so that it’s publicly visible (anybody can see it), only visible to other Lang-8 users, only visible to friends, or private (only you can see it).  Plus, you can choose to have it automatically shared on Twitter and/or Facebook.

 Step 4: Wait for Someone to Correct Your Entry (it won’t take long)

Like, a few minutes in my experience.  The site is very active, very popular, and so entries tend to get corrected very quickly, especially for popular languages like English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian, Portuguese, etc.  Even things like Czech or Swedish will get corrections within the hour, typically.  Plus, you’ll almost always have multiple corrections, that is more than one native speaker will leave a correction for you which is fantastic in my opinion since they’re almost always different!  Different people have different ways they prefer to phrase things, native speakers can be mistaken about their own language (and the more people that look at your entry, and others’ corrections of it, the more likely a mistake like that is to be called out), different dialects have different rules of syntax (and even grammar!) and different expressions (Spanish especially has huge variation amongst it’s many, many dialects), and it’s just great to have several different perspectives on the same thing.

That’s pretty much it, I hope that was interesting, let me know what you think in the comments (and would like me to write about in the future), 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

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 this, you can be a complete beginner, it’s not a problem).

First of all, how to find them.  The following has been my go-to site whenever I want to find a newspaper to read in a foreign language I’m learning, there are several lists and such out there but this one is by far and away the best single resource if this is what you’re interested in: NewspaperMap.com.  Go there now (open it in a new tab/window, if you click on it it should do that automatically), I’ll give you some basic instructions on how to use it below along with screenshots for each step plus some additional bonus resources that will help you utilize it.

Step 1: Filter by Language

When you first go to the site you’ll see a lovely, colorful map with every newspaper in their database represented by a marker that looks vaguely like a hot air balloon (nifty!).  Each color represents a different language (for example, as you can probably guess by looking at the United States, English is yellow).  You need to narrow it down to your language that you’re learning.  Go to the menu bar at the top and select the “Filter by Language” menu – select the language you want (which will be Spanish for most of you).

Also, quick tip: you can grab and drag the map around with your mouse cursor if need be – that is, if the country you want isn’t visible on the screen just grab the map and drag it into view.  Additionally, you can zoom in and out with the scroll wheel on your mouse if you have one.

Step 2: Choose a Newspaper

You can do this by country if you like, if you have a particular dialect you’re interested in learning, or you can select a larger newspaper because it’s likely to have more material, better resources, and a better website, or you can just randomly pick one, whatever you want to do.  Clicking one of the markers brings a little information box up telling you about the paper you’ve selected, in this case El País in Cali, Colombia is what I’ve picked.

Step 3: Open the Newspaper’s Website and a Translation of It in Your Native Language

Now, I want you to pay attention to two links you need to click now: one which takes you directly to that newspaper’s website (which is, obviously, in the language you’ve selected) and then the other which will take you to the Google Translate translation of that newspaper’s website which has been translated into whatever language you want.  In the upper left hand corner there in larger font than anything else is the name of the newspaper: that’s the link directly to their homepage.  You need to open that in one tab.  Now, in another tab you want to open the translation of that same page in whatever your native language is.  Look at the long list of languages in the box (each one of those links to a translation in that language by Google Translate) and select your native language so that it opens in another tab.  English is, logically (since most of their users are native English speakers), the first option on the top left of the list.

I’ve got them open in two separate windows above for the sake of comparison but most of you will just want to use separate tabs – the original Spanish version is on the left and the Google Translate translation of it in English is on the right.   The Google Translate version won’t be perfect but it’ll be good enough for us to be able to use it, coupled with a Spanish dictionary, to figure out the meaning of everything being said, and that’s all we need, that’s plenty good enough.

Step 4: Get a Dictionary for Your Chosen Language

I recommend just opening an online one in another tab.  As I’ve stated repeatedly on this site, my number one by-far-and-away recommendation for Spanish is SpanishDict (I even made a post on why and how you can use it to do all sorts of cool things).  If you’re learning some language other than Spanish then my default recommendation is going to always be WordReference.  They’re consistently “pretty damned good” – maybe not always the best choice, but they’re reliably decent regardless of language.

Step 5: Start Reading, Look Up What You Don’t Know, and Learn It!

Simple.  You see a word in the language you’re learning that you don’t know and so you look it up in the dictionary and check the Google Translate translation to see how it’s being used, which can affect which definition for it applies.  Many words have multiple possible definitions and it just depends on the context which one is meant, which is why we have that translation open in another tab: it gives us the context.

Now you have just learned a new word and a legitimate way (context) in which it can be used because you’re seeing it used, by native speakers, in an actual real-world context (the newspaper article).

Additional Tips

1. Use Anki – it’s a flashcard program that I’ve used and recommended for years.  Just put all the new words (with their definitions) into Anki as flashcards; I also recommend you include (just copy and paste it) the actual sentence they were used in when you learned them as the example sentence (I recommend making the front of the card the English definition and then the back of the card the Spanish word and example sentence).  See my article on how to use it (demo video included) here.

2. Use Forvo to learn the proper pronunciation of all the new words you’re learning.  I can’t tell you how useful this site is, it’s basically just a huge database of native speakers pronouncing various words and phrases in their native language for you.  Their Spanish index currently has pretty much every word and phrase currently in use in the language (over 70,000 entries and rising every day), you should be able to find anything you want there, you should never not know how a word is pronounced.  For additional information, help, and tips see the video I made about how to use Forvo.

Oh, also note that you can download any entry from Forvo as an MP3 file which you can then insert into that word’s Anki card (just drag and drop it) so that when you reveal it the word will be pronounced for you.  Very cool.

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