Learn Spanish this weekend

The trick to learning any language is to find a way to immerse yourself in it–really consuming as much as you can all the time. That means that, rather than designating an hour here and there for study, you should be trying to incorporate the language into your everyday life and hobbies.

If Spanish speaking is your current language goal, you’ll find that it’s incredibly easy to find ways to fill your life with the language. With that said, here are a few ways to immerse yourself this weekend.

A few Spanish resources to get into this weekend:

Watch this: Spanish Television: Extr@

Even if you are more focussed on learning the Latin American Spanish accent, watching this Spanish program and reading the Spanish subtitles is good practice for learning to recognize spoken words. My tutor told me that if I can get used to the Spanish accent, I’ll have no problem deciphering words in Ecuador later this year.

This show might be a little over the top in terms of the humour, but it’s endearing. Plus, it’s actually got pretty good captions when it comes to Youtube. There’s an American character who is learning Spanish, so they do tend to speak slowly and do a little bit of teaching on the show–though it’s not really meant to be an educational program (as far as I can tell).

Listen to this: The News in Spanish (Podcasts)

I’ve mentioned this before, but I wanted to point out that there are two versions of this podcast–with the Spanish and Latin American accents. I think it’s good practice to listen to both. They are short episodes and each will focus on the news in their respective regions.

News in Slow Spanish

News in Slow Spanish Latino

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Read this: Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal

Did you know that you can read all of the Harry Potter books in Spanish on Kindle? It’s true. You can even hold down the words you don’t know and get the English translation (on the iPad app at least).

It’s good practice to read things that you are familiar with, that way you can figure out meanings from understanding the story and the context regardless.

Here’s another tip: don’t feel the need to look up every word or phrase that you don’t know.

As a beginner, it can be frustrating to look up every second word. It can take forever to get through one page that way. Don’t worry about it. As you become more familiar with certain words and recognize phrases that are repeated, you can start to understand the context and look up the ones that keep appearing. You don’t want to get frustrated or discouraged. Just relax, it’s not a test.

What are your favourite language learning resources?