In some situations half a dozen words can show respect for a culture and the desire to communicate. It’s surprising how few words you need when you begin to speak a foreign language. In survival mode we can get by with a few nouns along with gestures, as long as our audience is inclined to […]
How many Spanish words do I need? Read More »
For first-time language learners it is easy to be swayed by the flim-flam. In the 1980s it was Spanish in 3 months a popular beginners course consisting of a book and two or three cassettes (note to younger readers: cassettes were a bit like a mechanical mp3 that you needed to wind up with a
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Not so many years ago machine translations had a deserved reputation for being unreliable to the point of being laughable. You may well have filled a few minutos muertos playing the game of translating a normal English phrase into clunky Spanish and then translating it back into amusingly surreal English. Britain’s The Guardian newspaper published
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The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Conjugating Spanish verbs with the seemingly endless endings (weak pun intended) is one of the biggest challenges facing learners. Unless you have the sponge like brain of a child you will struggle to absorb the conjugations only from listening. So if you want to be to talk in
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Destinos Review Made in the 1980s Destinos tries to cover many of the various forms of spoken Spanish. The storyline opens in Mexico with a dying patriarch receiving a letter telling of a child he never knew he had. The story then follows a lawyer’s search that takes her first to Spain then Puerto Rico,
One thing Another thing Thing three Fourth thing Final thing This could be Good If you can customize colours and fonts this could work very well. Will this appear in the content Block? This is a test, nothing more, nothing less. I think that this should appear in the Contents block because that (above) is
Playing with columns Read More »
Understanding the use of the Pasado Continuo. With his usual thoroughness and clarity Vincente explains and gives examples of how these constructions are used to talk about the past. He explains how we would say ‘Estuve toda la noche hablando con gente’ but ‘llegué a la fiesta, y mis amigos ya estaban bebiendo’. Recommend for:
Estuve or estaba with Gerundio? Read More »
Free, altruistic and innovative. Communicating a vision While the Language Transfer format is similar to the one used by the late Michel Thomas, there are several significant differences in the approach. One difference is that while Michel Thomas recorded his best selling series late in life and sometimes sounds a little grumpy, the LT instructor
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Welcome to what we hope will be your new base for Spanish learning. With SO MUCH stuff out there it can be overwhelming and it is easy to spend too much time browsing when you could be working on your Spanish. Here you will find links to some of the most useful material out there.
