One thing I regularly hear from people interested in starting to learn Spanish is that they don’t know which tools to use to get started. At the same time, I hear from intermediate level Spanish learners that they are stuck on pronunciation (or listening comprehension or grammar….you get the idea).
Speaking Latino’s Start Spanish Today
Based on these questions we regularly receive, we have developed a free online course that answers these questions for you. Start Spanish Today (beta version) just launched this week with the first module.
This course will teach you the tools you need to learn Spanish online, at your own pace. It is a simple text course, that you may read through and learn step-by-step the best tools we have found to become fluent in Spanish. It does not actually teach you Spanish, however once you finish the course, you will already have started learning Spanish and will have all the tools in place for you to move forward.
The Italki Challenge
Coincidentally, the module we launched explains the website italki and how it is a powerful tool for learning Spanish (and many other languages) online.
This is great timing since we have been invited by italki to participate in the italki 2015 New Year’s Language Challenge which starts on January 15th and continues through February 28th.
For the challenge, anyone who signs up and finishes 20 hours of online learning through italki will receive credits to pay for future italki classes. The details are available here:
Take the italki Language Challenge
This has been a good nudge from italki to focus on our own language learning as we start the new year.
Since Diana and I are both already fluent in Spanish but want to share with you how to improve your Spanish using italki we decided to use italki in a couple different ways to demonstrate how you can improve your level with only a few hours of private lessons.
We have broken down the 20 hours of classes into the following:
• I will take about 14 hours of Italian classes (more on this in a moment)
• Diana will have 4 hours of classes with a couple different teachers from Spain
• She will also take 2-3 hours of classes with teachers from Mexico
I have chosen Italian since it interests me and parallels well with what a person’s experience would be doing something similar with Spanish. To give you an idea, my knowledge of Italian is limited to the vocabulary I learned using Memrise and less than 25 hours with Pimsleur courses. Of course, my fluency in Spanish and knowledge of Portuguese also provide a HUGE help for learning Italian. At this point my Italian would be labeled as A1 level using the CEFR framework. That means a beginner or close to it.
For Diana since she is fluent in Spanish but is still interested in improving her knowledge of regional Spanish, she has chosen two countries with significant regional differences even within each country. She will spend her hours learning about the real world Spanish used in specific regions of Spain and Mexico (she’ll share which regions in the future).
So over the coming weeks, stay tuned for the articles we will share about our experiences using italki. In the mean time if you have any questions about setting up and using italki, or the italki Language Challenge, please write us. We can definitely help you out.
If you are already an italki user, you might want to take a look at this article we wrote about 7 Different Uses For Italki You Might Not Have Considered.
7 Ways To Use italki You Might Not Have Considered
Finally, we’d like to thank italki for giving us the 20 hours of classes for free to participate in the challenge.
Check out these other articles to help you Learn Spanish.