Apr202010

Quiero Aprender el Idioma: Spanish Learning Resources

I want to learn Spanish.

For my bachelor's degree, FSU requires two "cultural enrichment" classes. For mine, I chose Spanish 101 and 102. There were a few reasons why I chose Spanish: I've taken Spanish classes in High School, two years actually, but I never retained as much information as I would have liked, I'd like to understand a new culture and how they communicate, and I'd like to retain some of my family's culture.

Since I've started my classes, my Spanish has improved drastically. I don't know if it's because of the incredible teachers that I've had, or if it's because I've had the high school level background and things are coming back to me now (or possibly a combination of the two). Regardless, it has greatly increased my desire to continue learning.

Sadly, however, I will not be taking any more Spanish classes at FSU (at least in the near future) since I will be graduating in a couple of weeks. To continue my learning of the language, I have been trying to find resources on the web. So far, this is what I've found:

  • Study Spanish: this site is awesome. It breaks everything down into units, and covers a lot of the language. Best of all, it is totally free; they do, however, offer a premium version of the site, but I haven't found the need for that yet.
  • Live Mocha: "social language learning." I haven't had an opportunity to really take advantage of this site, but I think that this summer I'll really jump into it. Live Mocha matches you up with someone that wants to learn your native language that knows the language you want to learn (so it will be a win-win learning experience).
  • Conjugation.org – Spanish Verb Conjugation: an awesome Spanish verb conjugator. It will conjugate in the present indicative, imperfect, preterite, future, conditional, imperative, present subjunctive, imperfect subjunctive, gerund, and past participle tenses. It will even identify most irregular verbs, and even attempt to conjugate verbs it doesn't know by following the normal Spanish conjugation rules.
  • Spanish Word-a-Day: a simple RSS feed that presents you with a new word everyday, giving its meaning, an example Spanish sentence, and translated English sentence.
  • Coffee Break Spanish: this is one of the first resources I have found. It's a podcast that goes over common Spanish phrases, such as travel, family, food, etc., and is great listening material.

Does anyone else have any recommendations? Reading material, podcasts, videos?