How I did it: I reviewed old textbooks, read Spanish magazines, watched Spanish TV, did free online courses and flashcards at livemocha.com and had a reasonably-priced weekly online tutor from Argentina at edufire.com.  My youngest son is taking Spanish in school so I am still using it a little bit, but I am marking this goal as done for now as I do not plan to do a lot of self-study with Spanish this coming year.

Lessons & tips: Making it easy to study is key.  I put links to the pages below on my homepage to make sure I visited them every day.  You could also just bookmark them. 

I forced myself to watch at least 30 minutes of Spanish TV a night most nights.  On basic cable around here that gives you a lot of choice.  There are some wonderful nature shows dubbed into Spanish and a lot of entertaining soap operas. 

For reading I used old textbooks, some old Spanish magazines and poetry books.

Getting a weekly tutor helped, especially with the speaking, which is what I was missing.  The online tutors at edufire.com are great and most give you a free initial session to see if you like it.

Resources: There are a lot of great free and cheap online resources.  Here are a few that I used the most.


www.livemocha.com for free online courses and flashcards


www.edufire.com for free flashcards and reasonably-priced local online tutors


Grammer Practice and Quizzes (also flashcards)

http://members.tripod.com/spanishflashcards/


Online Spanish verb conjugator:

http://www.verbix.com/languages/spanish.shtml


Verb conjugation trainer

http://www.spaleon.com/index.php

Jan 05, 2009, 01:27PM PST | 1 comment | 5 cheers