Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Study Spanish For Freshmen


I think you need to start by thinking of your reasons for studying and learning a new language such as Spanish. Is this for travel, or maybe work? Usually, the stronger your motivation for starting out to learn a language, the better your chances will be for success. I'm not trying to scare you off, there are many people that have successfully learned a language because they first loved the sound of the spoken language and as they studied further they found other reasons to continue their studies. What I want you to do though is to realize that learning a language is not something that will be done overnight. This can be a long process. It probably took you between 3 years or so before you were first speaking your native language. Those years were not spent idly, as a baby you were already studying and learning a language.

The first course I had in Spanish was a High School foreign language course. That class gave me a start for what I've learned on my own since then. It wasn't much, but we learned a lot of basic vocabulary and how to deal with verb conjugations. If you're starting out learning on your own there are a number of approaches you might take. For starters, you could look for courses at local community colleges. Many times they will have a short term language course at a relatively cheap price. The main problem some people have with a course like this is being able to devote the same time each day or week. I have been able to devote a lot of time to language learning, but it has been irregular. Sometimes the time I've been able to study is in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoon or evening. The next week it could be completely different. My suggestion is trying to find some time each and every day for you to work on improving your skills.

Rocket Spanish is a great course advertised online for beginners to learning the Spanish language. For $99.95 you get an instant download course with 31 audio programs, software to help with vocabulary, support, interactive audio lessons, grammar guides, basically a LOT of good material to get started.

Another great audio course for beginners is the freely available (http://fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php?page=Spanish) FSI Programmatic Spanish course. These FSI courses were created by the United States government and are primarily an Audio program, but there are also workbooks that go along with the audio. What once were tapes today is in Mp3 format and is quite portable. All of these audio tapes and books are available for free download from.

Many people would prefer to have a book of some sort to start out with. There are many good introductory books and written courses out there as well. One that has been recommended to me many times are the Berlitz courses. One of the clever things about the Berlitz books is their use of phonetic spellings to help you get the pronunciation. I personally think an audio approach is somewhat better, but for this books do have a useful place.

No matter which approach you decide to start out with, I hope you will continue. You shouldn't expect to learn the entire language in just a day or a week, commit yourself to a little time each day. As the saying goes, "the journey of a thousand miles begins with but one step." This is very true, but remember you have to keep taking one step after another. Once you finish one book or method you aren't done, you just need to keep looking for more ways to learn. Buena Suerte! and I hope that this has been a useful start on your way to find out how to learn spanish!

Avery J. Parker has been studying Spanish for over 5 years and has a site devoted to How to learn spanish for Beginners where you can find more tips for Learning Spanish.

Click Here To Learn More Information If you would like to learn Spanish quickly, please follow the link.

1 comment:

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