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Free Spanish Lessons - New!
Learn Spanish Free Online Whether you're a poor student or just plain cheap, there are a wealth of resources to learn Spanish for free online. Unfortunately, most of them are for beginners so it will be difficult for you to progress through the intermediate and advanced phases of learning without spending at least a little money on a good Spanish book or audio program. I've uploaded a few free Spanish grammar lessons and resources for you here, but they won't be enough to propel you to fluency on their own. If you have a bit of disposable income, I highly suggest you go to my learn Spanish page for some advice on how to make good use of some of the excellent commercial Spanish programs out there. You'll also want to check out my Spanish learning tools page for my reviews on some of the best products I've found. Now that we've gotten that out of the way, it's time to milk the internet for all it's worth and learn Spanish free online. Basic Spanish There are a multitude of good basic Spanish resources on the web. My favorites are both from the good chaps at the BBC. You should start with their old Talk Spanish series. It's 15 short video conversations (~2 minutes) accompanied by an English/Spanish transcript. The neat part is that you get to hear actual Spanish as it is really spoken from the beginning. This is much better than most audio courses where speech is slowed for easy comprehension. You may think that the fast speech is too hard at first but trust me, it will only severely handicap you later if you start out slow. Best to jump right in. At the same time you should also check out the BBC's other excellent program: Spanish Steps. This one is done in flash and is much sleeker than Talk Spanish. It contains 24 short lessons and also offers some basic grammar as opposed to Talk Spanish which is just a video with transcript. You should do them both together and assuming you study 30 minutes a day, you should be done in less than a month. In fact you should probably shoot for 15 days. By the time you're done, you should have adequate "survival Spanish" abilities. No more fear of getting lost on your way to the airport in Madrid! Daily practice is key: for every one day you skip, you need two days to make it up. If an English/Spanish dictionary helps, you can visit www.wordreference.com which supposedly has more than 120,000 words and definitions. It should be noted that since the BBC is based in Europe, its lessons are geared towards the Spanish heard in Spain. This isn't a huge deal but there is a bit of a difference between the Spanish spoken in Spain and in the Americas. Those of you who are Latin-inclined, you should check out Learn Spanish Today. They have some pretty good free beginners lessons and as of this writing were even offering a free cd-rom with some 19 lessons from their pay program. Of course, their ultimate goal is to get you to buy their full program, but who knows: you may like the sample lessons enough to pay and there's nothing wrong with taking advantage of their free offer even if you have no intention of buying. Intermediate Spanish It's easy to learn how to survive in Spanish for free on the internet, but it's much harder to learn to flourish. Most of the best resources from this point on are internet radio stations, videos, lyrics, and Spanish news sites. I suggest starting off by reading the top story on BBC Mundo. It will probably take you a while and you may have to constantly refer to a dictionary, but that's ok. During this time, WRITE DOWN every word that you don't know along with the definition. You can save this in a file on your computer or better yet, on a piece of notebook paper you can take with you. Then, when you have a second (waiting for the elevator, traffic light, etc) pull it out and memorize a word or two. After about a month of this, you should have a large enough vocabulary to get the gist of most normal news stories. In the meantime you should be absorbing all of the language you can from your surroundings by tuning into Spanish language TV and radio in your hometown. If there aren't any, you can listen to Radio Nacional de España live online. You should also check out BBC sueños for some more video lessons, this time a bit more advanced than before. Also, be sure to check out their intermediate audio magazine El Mensual (The Monthly) for something new and interesting every month. Another idea is to turn on Spanish subtitles and dubbing on the DVDs you already own. A good strategy for this is to first watch the movie in English with Spanish subtitles. Then, you should switch the audio over to Spanish with English subtitles to get a feel for the spoken language but with a crutch. The 3rd time, you should watch with both Spanish audio and subtitles because by now you know what the movie is about and can figure out the dialog fairly easily even if you have to paraphrase in your mind. Finally, watch it with Spanish audio and no subtitles. The movie may be boring by the 4th viewing but let me tell you, watching 4 or 5 movies this way will do wonders for your comprehension. The point is that you should be reading and listening to anything you can possibly find that is even remotely related to Spanish. Advanced Spanish Here's where all your hard work will pay off.. You should continue reading the news, watching Spanish DVDs, etc. By this time you should be very, very good at understanding Spanish but relatively inexperienced at writing and speaking it. The only place to go from here is to start actually using the language in real life. How do you do that? The possibilities are endless! Go to a Mexican restaurant and start a conversation. Get a Hispanic girlfriend or boyfriend. But the single best advanced Spanish learning tool online is chat.yahoo.com. Find a Spanish chat room and just talk to people. Not only will you learn the language rapidly but you'll learn the culture too. You'll also be introduced to some slang and regional differences. Continue practicing your Spanish at every opportunity and you will someday achieve a relatively high degree of fluency. However, there is simply no substitute for spending time in a Spanish-speaking country to develop a real near-native fluency in the language. But you should congratulate yourself for your dedication as you have done something that very few have: learned Spanish free online!
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