I learned basic Spanish in two semesters of high school, but that was years ago, and I need a much better understanding of it if I want to have the best time I can when visiting my friend Rachel in Costa Rica.
So, I have about a month before the trip. A couple of weeks ago I identified some steps to take, and tonight I loaded a bunch of flashcards into Mnemosyne, a very useful program that lets you rate how well you have different pieces of vocab memorized, and shows the ones you have memorized less well more often.
I’m starting by learning the 500 most-spoken Spanish words, and I need to create additional flash cards for the most common phrases.
I’m fortunate to have several friends who speak Spanish well, so I need to start having basic conversations more often too.
And my final step is having an English-Spanish translation service bookmarked in my browser toolbar. I want to make sure anything I don’t know how to say, or suddenly realize I’ll likely want to be able to say, I can have the translation ready to learn with a click of a button.
So, I feel decently prepared for learning. Now I just need to put as much time into it as I can spare, with all the other stuff I have going on.
