Still watching Destinos

Aouch...! Lack of time, I'm still watching the novela I posted on my last entry. Believe me, it's worth a try. But, before doing so, you have to be fluent with verb tenses, and grammar to grasp most of the show.

What's wonderful with Destinos, is you also learn some cultural background, and the differents accent of some south spanish countries.

Spanish novela for beginners

It's always good to watch some videos with spanish natives speakers. When surfing, I stumbled upon this good learging site, where you can watch for free, a kind of novela (52 episods of 30 min).



Link : http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html?pop=yes&pid=444#jump1

Michel Thomas a different way to learn spanish

I'm finishing this method right now (Still 2 units). It's a Pimsleur-like method, which contain 6 units (6 CD = 6 units), where you do have to interact by making sentences in the gaps leaved for this purpose, and also repeat some words loudly. Michel Thomas host the show (if we we can call it a show), with 2 uk students.

I don't like his way to mnemonic every single spanish quirk (Tonic accent, esta/este..). It even confuses his students more than ease their brain works, and we can hear it with  his student when dealing with the tonic accent on the 5th CD, 6th lesson (Hablar, Yo hablo).

Also, he gets a terrible english accent, even though i do understand the most of his explanations, his spanish accent is even terrible and
don't show us a real native spanish accent...

I started this method with 2 levels of spanish courses as a background, that's why I didn't find any diffuclties to follow his explanations, and more even I do skip his tips (or rules) to memorize things easily as I explained it
I do recommand the use of this method for beginner to start with, and of course use a grammar/dictionnary books with it. It's always helpful.

Official site 

PS: Of course, you can always get it from your library for no fee, and even from other sources...You can guess !!!

My Best Spanish Podcasts

Lingoes, a free spanish dictionary software

When I'm surfing the net and reading spanish website, I don't want to fire my browser to look for a word, or a software and write the word down, and hit a button search to get the definition.

I was using Babylon on his early appearance, and wonder why there's no personl free license... Yeah, I know I can always get a cracked copy of a workable version...

It's wonderful how easy was to use Babylon, it fires and hides itself after display with a simple click.

On a recent search, I found Lingoes. It gets a same working schema as Babylon, but the dictionnary is not exhaustive. We can cope with this 'lacune' as it's free..

Though it was working great, I'm now getting some problem with it, when launching it on a word in Firefox page...

You can get it here

Learn vocabulary, no easy way

After a long moment on getting Spanish grammar ( estar & ser duet, par/para paradigm), I moved on to learn vocab. A lot of tools have been developed to ease the work. Among them, i do use the freewere Anki



From the Anki site :
Anki is a program designed to help you remember facts (such as words and phrases in a foreign language) as easily, quickly and efficiently as possible.
To do this, it tracks how well you remember each fact, and uses that information to optimally schedule review times. With a minimal amount of effort, you can greatly increase the amount of material you remember, making
study more productive, and more fun.


I can always share my Anki spanish vocabulary (Yeah, forget... the flash cards are in Spanish/French-English). Just drop me a comment, and I'll send it to you.

Lastfm pluggin

How did I miss this ? As a regular user of firefox, I don't know even if I close it, yeah I know...sometimes, for memory reasons....

When ( as always) reading my rss lifehacker news, I stumbled on the mozilla best extensions, and among theses nifty little pluggins, I found lastfm pluggin, called firefm.



A nice pluggin to listen to music when surfing the web
You can get it here