Learning from courses and books

[jamlech]

¡Hola!

I have purchased many courses to help me learn spanish and many of them have fallen short of my expectations and teaching needs. Everyone is different, has different needs and learns differently. This is why I have liked some courses and disliked others.

I will list a few below for those that desire to know what I am using to learn spanish.

Rosetta Stone- This is a great course. I like the layout and the design. The best part to me is the speech recognition. It falls short in a few areas for me and my learning needs but overall it has been very usefull and I could not live without it.

Living Language Ultimate Spanish- I will not get into too much detail here. I do not like this course from the layout to the structure of the lessons. Too much is missing for my learning needs so I can live without this product.

Study Spanish dot com's Camino del Exitó- This is my most favorite course so far. It has 15 cd's, a companion website for the main course and a premium 1 year membership to studyspanish.com. The thing I like most about the course is it focuses on conversational spanish...words and phrases you hear and use everyday.

The premium membership site has hundreds of quizes, tests, final exams and oral exercises for the grammer section. Then there is a vocabulary section that teaches you the most used words for a variety of topics. There are quizes, tests, and flashcard drills for this section as well.

I love this whole course. The structure is great as well as the format of all the written lesson materials. If I had to choose only one course a day to study it would be this one...it is that good to me.

Barrons Outreach Spanish- This is a great book that is full of usefull spanish that will have you up and speaking in no time at all. I love the lesson content and the structure of the lessons. I feel like I can't live without this book.

Barrons Learn Spanish the Fast and Fun Way- This is a decent book but I just did not care for the layout of the lessons. They were not to my liking. I could live without this book.

Learn in Your Car Spanish- This is a cd course that helps you learn spanish in your car. It is ok for me but it gets a little boring. The structre is good though. I could live without this course.

I hope this helps other people looking to learn the spanish language. I will go into more depth when I have the time. Goodbye!

[CrOtALiTo]

There're a lot of post about Rosseta Stones

They are CD's room with the some kind of methods for the learning in Spanish.
You should to find more information in old post with the same information.

[chileno]

Jamlech:

All you need is to get a novel in Spanish and a couple of bilingual dictionaries.

The novel should be of a theme you really love, and ideally a novel that you have already read in English. Then set out to translate the whole thing phrase after phrase from Spanish to English. Write every phrase/paragraph in Spanish and then translate it, look for pronunciations and try to pronounce it as close as you can while you record yourself. Later revise your pronunciation against the real pronunciation (can be had in some internet sites), which by the way you can also have the audio version of the novel too, so that you can compare your pronunciation and will help with your listening skills too.

That's it.

You need to have an iron will in order to remain at it.

Watch a movie with the Spanish audio option on, do not worry if you don't understand (hearing) anything at first, just pay attention to the action taking place and that's it, pretty soon you'll start making out the words of the movie and coupling them to the action taking place etc.

If you do it this way, you are most likely to start being good at Spanish in a year or less, say that in two years you shouldn't have any problem with the language, and by that time you would have had the time to even study the grammar too, if you are so inclined. Task that I leave for when you're fairly understanding most everything.

See (c) (Sí)?

:)

Hernan.