CategorySpanish

Following up on my last post about my philosophy for a language course for adult learners, in this blog post I wanted to talk a bit about the content for such a course. To start, I want to contrast how this curriculum is designed to work in contrast with “traditional” foreign-language instruction (at least, how I experienced it when I was learning Spanish). While traditional instruction is...

I’m starting on a project to think more concretely about what I believe an ideal foreign language course would look like. While all of these thoughts are based on my own experience learning Spanish and may not work as well for people with different brain organizations, I thought it’d be worth at least writing down how I’d use modern technology to design a foreign language course that would be...

My number one best tool for learning Spanish has been the spaced repetition flashcard app Anki. I’ve written about Anki as a key component of my general approach to learning Spanish, and have talked about how important memorizing massive amounts of vocabulary is to any endeavor, but today I’m going to write in a bit more detail about the tactics I’ve developed for efficient Anki...

I moved to Mexico a little over a year ago and it’s fair to say that I drastically underestimated how difficult it would be to learn to speak Spanish. Before moving here I had been doing some on-and-off self study (i.e., duolingo) plus a mixture of the occasional italki tutoring lessons and two short beginner Spanish courses through Idlewild books in New York. I remember vividly being on...

I’ve been learning Spanish for about the last year and a half, and I finally feel like I’m making real progress. Living in Mexico City definitely helps by giving me more opportunities to practice, but I do not believe that simply being around Spanish will help you make much progress unless you already have extensive training (say, 4+ years in school) or you are extremely diligent in...