If your native language is English the idea of giving a gender to inanimate objects is an odd concept.Lots of languages (not just ones of Latin origin) have genders for nouns representing sexless objects and abstract concepts.As Spanish doesn’t use a neuter, all nouns* are assigned a gender. Nouns and Gender To be frank it […]
Some of the first phrases you should learn are the ones to acquire new vocabulary. Ask for advice on what to say and clarification of what is said there and then surrounded by meaningful (and therefore more memorable) context. Learn to ask Cómo se dice… ¿Cómo se llama eso? Immediately repeat the answers that you
How do you say; How do you say that in Spanish? Read More »
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
How long does it take to learn Spanish? Read More »
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
Review: DeepL Translator Read More »
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
Review: Verbarrator Read More »
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
Language Transfer Review Read More »
