Hola!

[marketof]

Hi people. Thank you for putting together such an outstanding forum! I've been searching for things and this is just bursting with information!

I'll introduce myself. I'm Just beginning my Spanish studies. I have been learning flamenco guitar and dance for a year and want to learn Spanish so I can understand (and sing) the flamenco songs - which really are at the heart of flamenco, so vital, I believe, to fully experience it.

I have a grammar/basic-vocab book, which I love: 'An Essential Course in Modern Spanish' by H Ramsden. It's a bit old (1959), but it's the only written course that I feel I can get on with. I'm a fairly experienced linguist (French, Russian, and two ancient languages), so I like to take the material on quickly and I like the concise, rapid way this book takes you through the material - no frills. I'm hoping that being written in the 50s won't cause too many problems - I'm sure I'll have to learn the more modern expressions later on, but I'm hoping that I can learn the fundamental grammar and vocab from this book. I also have the full Berlitz audio-visual course (CDs), which I'm using to help with pronunciation. I'm finding this Berlitz course cumbersome to use - but as I'm just using it for pronunciation I'm hoping that will be okay.

To back this up, I've also just bought some books by Ron E Batchelor, which look useful to back up when I get stuck on technical questions.

I'm aiming for Iberian (mainland Spanish) accent cos that's where the flamenco world is centered (actually mainly in Madrid/Cadiz/Andalucia, I think).

Finally, when I've got a bit of conversation under my belt I plan to check out some of the Meetup.com groups in my area (West London) - try to find some that are not just dating groups, but really want to practice the language ... And if I can't find any, I'll start up my own Spanish beginners conversation group in Ealing/Chiswick, W London.

Many thanks!! marketof