Blogs by Design: Learning Spanish

After the rousing success of the first requested blog I decided to continue...

Growing up in the woods in Linden Grove I didn't really have much of a reason to learn Spanish.  My dog didn't really care what language I spoke as long as I scratched his ears and gave him my left overs. Most of the imaginary friends I had  didn't talk to me at all.  The only foriegn culture I had was from the Canadian Channel and as far as I could tell they were just like me...smelled like maple syrup and a fresh cut ax.  I'm not sure I even knew there was such thing as Spanish, except may be for the Speedy Gonzales cartoons, which as far as I can tell is a rather accurate portrayal of your average Mexican mouse.  Besides that my dad would sometimes refer to "Metsaco" which for years I thought was a company owned by the Metsas who lived in the area.

When I was in high school I had to take a Spanish Class and I think my only thought about it was, "Why the heck do I need to know Spanish?!!?"  Warp ahead 10 years and I'm obviously dating a man straight out of Mexico...it was during this time I instantly regretted not knowing how to say anything in Spanish besides, "Where is the library?"  This summer while I slaved away at Vermilion Houseboats I decided to enrich my mind by teaching myself Spanish.  And let me tell you...it's not really all that easy.  How do you teach yourself something you don't even know?  It's a perplexing idea.  Sure...after a few weeks I could repeat the audio books I had downloaded...I can count...I can say simple things...but as soon as someone who grew up speaking Spanish starts talking I might as well be licking my drool off the window of the short bus.  It's hard to learn Spanish when you really have nobody around you at any time who will speak Spanish with you...hell most of the guys I hang out with barely speak English.  Every once in a while I'd speak with some of my Spanish speaking friends on Skype or by phone but I quickly realized they were about as adept at teaching Spanish as I was.

I really wanted to buy the Rosetta Stone program but I just could not justify the $600 price tag.  I could never actually find anyone who had bought and used the program but always heard something like, "Oh my friend's friend bought it and it worked really well for him...also he was taking classes."  I kind of feel like it's so much money that people just lie about it working so that they don't look like an idiot for buying it.  Kind of like the people who fall for those scams where you spend in $200 bucks to get a plaque saying how smart you are.  Anyway  I tried going to the local library to see if they had such a program to either use at their facility or to borrow.  The hardest part was getting to the Library during it's business hours.  They seem to be open every other Tuesday from 3-3:30.  Once inside I asked the librarian if they had such a program and she just looked at me like I was a moron for even considering they would have such a thing.  After asking if they had any language learning software she directed me to the "Computer learning" section which consisted of such titles as, "Email for Dummies" and the manual for Windows 98.

     So instead of spending $600+ on a program that was not guaranteed to work I cobbled together my own programs.  I found a few great websites that helped. http://www.busuu.com/  http://www.studyspanish.com/ Both of which are free but try to get you buy more.  Also http://quizlet.com/ is a great site for making your own flash cards.  They will even have a realistic Spanish speaker say the words in Spanish for you.  Besides that I downloaded the audio book Spanish for Dummies.  I also bought the program call Spanish Immersion which had multiple discs with varying effectiveness.  I then found a few ebooks that are free to download which really helped my reading and recollection.  And supplemented all that with a few Apps.  Jibbigo is a great program you can just talk into and it translates and doesn't need the internet.  Spanishtt is a nice little learning tool and byki was also pretty good.  I also downloaded a Spanish Slang app which was fun for learning a few slang terms and sayings.  All in all I spent under 100$ and I think it was really a much better program than anything out there.