Spanish

 

Learning Spanish is fun. Spanish is a fiesta. Spanish are the lyrics of many a passionate song and Spanish are the names of many a mouthwatering dish. It’s (relatively) easy, energetic, has great music and food: in short, one of the coolest languages to study, and there is plenty of learning material available because of all those North Americans studying it. Here are some of my favorite resources.


Language Transfer
This is a really great YouTube channel offering audio for learning a growing number of languages. It uses its own ‘Thinking Method’, which teaches you a language through providing you with a logical way to remember grammar and vocabulary. It makes you understand the language instead of merely showing what it looks like. You for example don’t just memorize a new word, but get to derive it from words you already know: this works especially well with English and Latin languages, because you can ‘transfer’ a lot of words from English into Spanish (thanks to William the Conquerer).

Extra Spanish
I confess that I really enjoyed this series about a group of adolescents and their problems – silly but very educational! It is produced especially for people learning the language: the level of the dialogues increases with every episode (all subtitled) and thus perfectly functions as a support to regular grammar and vocabulary lessons.

Frequency dictionary
Lists of the most frequently used words in a language are very efficient ways of learning vocabulary and this one is particularly nice as it features example sentences for every word – not to mention because it’s available for free in PDF.

Learning with Oliver
If you make an account on this website, you can opt for an absolutely great daily or weekly newsletter with new words and example sentences at your level.

Coffee Break Spanish
The best Spanish podcast I know of, with lots of episodes for beginnersintermediate and advanced learners.

Readlang
Reading in another language is effective for learning (for example El PaísEl Mundo and BBC Mundo) but not much fun if you have to look up every other word. This application called Readlang is a great free addition to your browser that gives a translation simply by clicking on a word. Even better: it saves those words (and the sentence in which they appear) for later review as flashcards.

SpanishDict
Apart from a dictionary and verb conjugator, this page offers an extensive overview of Spanish grammar with for every topic the possibility to test yourself. Really nice is also their word of the day email newsletter.

Transparent Spanish
Transparent Language has a series of blogs for different languages with very helpful content.

El Castellano
For my fellow etymology enthusiasts: this website about the Spanish language, castellano in Spanish, has an etymology dictionary and a newsletter called Palabra del Día. The latter will send you twice a week the etymology of a Spanish word, and as a bonus a Latin quote and an answer to a grammar question.