As promised in the previous post, this post will overview select sources I’ve found to be helpful for learning French or Spanish through listening. They all offer great exposure to a lot of vocabulary words in each episode, as well as a wide variety of subject matter to listen to. If you can, I would encourage listening to many different sources even if the topics aren’t especially interesting for you – just don’t make yourself listen to something uninteresting for a long tim

Building your vocabulary through extensive reading should keep you busy for a while. But sometimes, you might want to mix in some listening, or you might be at a point where you’ve done enough reading to feel ready to spend most of your language learning time on listening for a while. To help you succeed in listening to French or Spanish whenever you’re ready, this post will give you some good tips on the difference in difficulty of different media, keeping your expectations

As you get the hang of reading with the three-pass method and other practice, one thing you should seek for building vocabulary more easily in the beginner or lower-intermediate level is reading in a familiar context . Reading in familiar contexts allows you to figure out what a French or Spanish text is saying because you already know about the situation it describes. While you could probably find other topics you’re used to for this technique, I recommend reading about U.S.

As promised in last week’s post, here I will explain a foreign language reading method that I discovered by happy accident while reading to learn Spanish. As the title of this post implies, material is read three times over in this learning process. The way you read the material changes somewhat with each pass, but each pass also has an important function for supporting your learning – I think you’ll understand why when you try this for yourself. Before getting into the three

Your journey into mastering a foreign language has begun! After the previous two posts, you have good reasons why you’re learning and some rules of thumb to start with. Now, it’s time to start learning some words!

In my previous post , Why Learn French or Spanish , I gave three practical reasons for why  a native English speaker should learn French and/or Spanish. Now the questions is, how  should you get started? With lots of free resources available, especially for Spanish, this won’t be too hard as long as you have a sustainable and effective daily process. It should be a process that you can reliably complete in about 20 minutes each day. Learning these languages will be easier and

Bottom line of this post:  learning French and/or Spanish will  benefit you for the rest of your life.