Hi all,
My free Spanish Language lessons from Rocket Spanish are queuing up at the moment, but I thought I’d take a break from it today to speak about the ‘Tell Me More” Spanish lessons. I mentioned it a few days ago in a previous draft and I thought I’d go back and take a look at it…
Free ‘Tell Me More’ demo
I didn’t have to fill in as much info as I thought the other day, so I’ve registered for the free demo. The Spanish language demo form ‘Tell Me More’ is not quite the same as the Rocket Spanish demo – While the Rocket Spanish free lessons are real interactive lessons, the Tell Me More demo is a video which displays what you get and how it works, which is in some ways more usefull, as you get to see all the facilities available.
Continue reading 'Tell Me More!'»
Hola! ¿De dónde eres?
Well, I received my third free Spanish language lesson yesterday. Thursday is always a busy day for me, so I left it till today to go through the lesson. This lesson goes through basic greetings and is a nearly 30 minutes long, so make sure your coffee is made and the ‘do not disturb’ sign is on the door before you start!
This course is really growing on me. The audio is done in quite a clever way which makes you repeat each of the new words several times throughout the conversation – in fact by the end I was listening for the spaces to I could see how close my pronunciation was to the teacher’s! I actually took about 45 minutes to do the lesson, I rewound a few times to make sure I got the pronunciation correct.
I’m now looking forward to tomorrow’s lesson, which should err, actually arrive later today!
Bye till tomorrow,
Stephen.
Hola! ¿Cómo está usted?
Well, as you can see from this heading that my attempts to learn the Spanish language are paying off 
. I received my second free lesson by email today and there’s quite a lot to it. Like yesterday, there is a link in the email to a Rocket Language website page which contains the lesson content. Yesterday’s lesson was a 15 minute audio, and today’s is a written lesson which starts by explaining the grammar in yesterday’s lesson.
Day two content
There’s no audio in lesson 2, the next audio should be tomorrow. The layout of the lesson is very pleasant and there’s a short cartoon to add some humour to the lesson. The lesson teaches you how to say hello, both informally and formally. It took about 10 minutes to go through, but there are a few new words so I shall go over them a couple of times before tomorrow’s lesson. So far so good…
See you tomorrow,
Stephen.
P.S. If you’d like to get this free six day Spanish language course for yourself you can get it from the Rocket Language website. Let me know how you get on!
The free 6 day course I'm following
Hola!
If you’ve read my previous post you’ll know that I signed up for a free six day Spanish language course at Rocket Spanish. My first email (the course is by email, with links to the Rocket Spanish web site where you need access to the multimedia) arrived today and I’ve completed my first lesson, or ½ lesson – the course consists of audio and text, and the emails give you the lesson audio 1 day and text the next. The idea seems to be to get you listening to and speaking the Spanish language rather than just learning grammar. I think this is a good idea – if you are already familiar with the words of a language and how they sound it’s mush easier to remember how to read and spell them.
The Audio
The first lesson consisted of a welcome email with information on how the course is structured. The actual material for the lesson was on the Rocket Spanish website (there was a link in the email which took me straight there!), consisted of 15 minutes of audio, and was all about meeting and greeting people. There was a really nice touch to this – you can listen to the lesson directly on the web page, or you can download a high quality version and listen to it when you want – it’s MP3, so you can even load it onto you MP3 player and listen to it when you’re out!
The web page also has an English/Spanish translation so you can familiarise yourself with the written words. What I really like about this audio lesson is that it is self contained – The cheap course I’d bought before going to Barcelona was a CD/book combination – but you had to have the book with you when you were listening to the CD otherwise it didn’t make any sense.
Continue reading 'My first lesson of the free six day course…'»
Yep, Oranges DO grow on trees in Seville!
Back from Barcelona
Right, time to write another post in my ‘trying to learn Spanish’ saga. After the fun I had in Barcelona (my travel companions where somewhat amused!) I decided to go and find myself a proper course in Spanish.
How much!!!!
As I mention in my ‘About Me’ page, I’d already decided that an interactive language course was the right one for me. I thought an evening class would be a good idea, so I gave my local college a call to enquire about evening classes. A very nice lady answered the phone and informed me that they did indeed have a course starting at soon. When I asked the price, well, all I can say is it was a good job I was sitting! It was several hundred for the year – What happened to the days when it cost £30 a term?
Finding some decent software
Well I really wanted to learn Spanish properly – It was fun being in Barcelona and speaking to the nice lady at the train station (see my last post), even if I had totally misunderstood her. Next stop was a search for some Spanish language software in my local PC World. I manage to find a couple of PC cds, but in all honesty they looked like they were written for 3 year olds. So my search took me to the internet, which I guess is where I should have started in the first place. I spent a couple of hours trying to find what looked like a half decent Spanish Language course and managed to find two which appeared to be good quality. One was at a site called ‘Tell me more’, the other ‘Rocket Spanish’. Rocket Spanish offer a free six day course and, not being one to miss a freebie, I decide to go with that (‘Tell me more’ offered a free demo, but there was a short form to fill in and I was feeling a little lazy, so I’ll go back to that if Rocket Spanish language course is not up to scratch).
OK, tea’s ready, I’ll let you know how I get one with the Rocket Spanish language software course in my next post…
Adios!
The Sagrada Família in Barcelona has some beautiful views!
This post is about how I discovered the right and wrong ways of learning the Spanish language… I’m a software writer by profession and tend to spend long days in an office in front of a computer, so I like to travel when I can to try to get some sun. If I’m with a nice partner so much the better! Most of my travels have been in Europe and I’ve generally found it quite easy to get by with my English and schoolboy French. I recently decided on a trip to Barcelona, a place I’d not visited before. My girlfriend and daughter decided they’d like to come along, so off we went…
Before embarking I decided to brush up on my Spanish. I’m not too keen on learning from books, preferring something interactive. With this in mind I did a quick search for some Spanish language software online. I found a few free web sites which claimed to be able to teach you Spanish in a few days, but they looked a little amature, and the decent ones were a bit too expensive for me at the time, so I settled for a cheap CD/book combination. Within a couple of weeks I had mastered the language (OK, I knew how to ask ‘where the station’ is and ‘how much does that cost’ , but that was enough for me).
It was a beautiful day when we arrived in Barcelona. The first thing to do was to get from the hotel to the city itself. They have a lovely clean rail system, but I couldn’t work out what ticket to buy at the automatic ticket dispenser machine thingy, so I asked. The lady I spoke to couldn’t speak a word of English (common in Barcelona I later found out), so I used my new found language skills to interrogate her and bought a day ticket for the three for us for about 10 Euros( that’s a bargain, I thought).
Continue reading 'A trip to Barcelona: The right way to learn the Spanish language?'»
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