You can LEARN SPANISH too!

I have always regretted only taking 2 years of Spanish in high school. Since then, I listen to Spanish music in my car, have fallen in love with salsa dancing, and make every attempt to speak Spanish at work, when appropriate. Unfortunately, my Spanish is still not good enough to provide services at the quality that I would like to for the under served Hispanic community in Southern California.

I have found the following resources useful:

ONLINE RESOURCES

Destinos Telenovela (http://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html)

• It is FREE with 52 episodes. I started watching this educational soap opera in my high school Spanish class. I bought the supplementary workbooks and have found it to be very motivating. Note that I could not watchi it using Firefox. I had to use Internet Explorer.

Livemocha (http://www.livemocha.com/)

• I signed up to learn vocabulary, practice listening, and take lessons. I was able to search for Spanish speaking users to review my compositions and speaking skills and reciprocate by providing them with English assistance.

Bitesized Languages (http://www.bitesizedlanguages.com/)

• I receive daily emails with a sentence in Spanish with audio pronounication and English translation.

http://www.spanishdict.com/

• My favorite translation tool AND they provide free online lessons.
  

http://www.onlinespanishhelp.com/

• Useful for conjugations.

http://www.colby.edu/~bknelson/SLC/index.php

• This is an AWESOME website even for intermediate-advanced Spanish learners.

http://lomastv.com/

• This is a really fun way to see Spanish music videos, interviews, skits, comedies, dramas, translated into English word for word. You do have to pay for a subscription, but there are free demos. Click on each word for a definition. Slow down the videos if they are too fast for you to comprehend. Check out my favorite Spanish song "Fotografia" by Juanes and Nelly Furtado.

http://www.lingus.tv/

• Similar to Lomastv.com, but offers many more free videos. Unfortunately, their user tools are not as cool as Lomastv.
  

NON-ONLINE RESOURCES

Rosetta Stone (Levels 1, 2,3)

• This was good for expanding my vocabulary. However, I also tried to learn Russian with Rosetta Stone, but have found that it is very difficult to learn the grammatical structure of both languages as you have to guess what it is.

Santa Monica College

• I took SPANISH 2 with Professor Yun Sook Kim who was a funny teacher that made Spanish concepts easy for me to learn.

• The online workbook sold separately from the textbook “DOS MUNDOS” was very useful in reinforcing grammatical concepts.

HAPPY LEARNING!