Gathering your materials

I’ve given quite some tips on how to begin, how to keep momentum, etc., etc. The thing I haven’t discussed is what I think are the best materials. Sure, sentences are a important part of my learning routine (and should be important for you aswell), but it’s not the only thing. I use some very handy (and often cheap or free) resources to get exposure from. That’s what I want to do today; some resources I think are necesarry for you all or which will boost your learning progress.

Get exposure/input
Language learning is all about getting yourself enough exposure. Textbooks want to let you believe this can only be done by artificial dialogues and stupid work lists. Bull**** I say, that’s not how natives learned Spanish. Spaniards learned Spanish from hearing and seeing a lot of Spanish, that’s why they’re so good at it. So the tip I want to give you, is this: Get. Native. Materials. NOW! It’s that simple. Buy Spanish books from Amazon.com or get them from a Cervantes library near your place. Although Amazon doesn’t have much DVD’s for Spaniards, there are plenty other good (Spanish) companies around which sell them at good prices (again, if there’s a Instituto Cervantes near your house, you might get them there aswell).

Me for example: I love watching Friends. And although I used to hate dubbed series and movies (which is not good if you want to learn Spanish, so you’d better get over it), I got muself two seasons of it on DVD and searched the internet for transcripts in Spanish. Although I only use the audio for understanding (yes, I don’t use the subtitles), I can use the transcripts if I misunderstand something or for acquiring more sentences.

Another thing you should consider, is getting yourself a satellite dish. Yeah, be like a foreigner in your own country, but if you don’t live in a country where there are a lot of Spanish channels on cable tv (like in the U.S.) you might want to buy a satellite dish. They can be a bit expensive, but if you can tune in on hundreds of Spanish channels, it’s worth every dime. You could also try WWITV of course, but there are only a few good channels and buffering a channel can take ages.

SpanishPod
If you were going to spend money on Spanish learning materials (other than native materials), you’d better spend it on SpanishPod. The first 7 days of your account you have access to all the premium materials, which are really good. Not only you have a nice podcast to listen to, you also have a PDF file with the dialogue transcript, a vocabulary list (brrrr, word list), expansion (THIS is what you need. Ready-to-copy sentences. Personally I translate the English part to Dutch, but it’s still good) and some good exercises to train and measure the learned language. After the 7 days it can get ugly, because a premium membership is $30 a month. If you can’t miss that amount of money, consider the basic membership, which gives you the dialogue PDF and mp3 in CD quality. But better get the premium content, because it’s a great source of sentences (the first 90+ lessons will give you over 1500 sentences).

So what’s the best way to use SpanishPod? Of course to listen to the podcasts, but try to listen to the ones you like (subjects you like, of course) and things you think you may need in the near future, and listen to them often. The podcasts aren’t linked together liked normal lessons, so you can pick out the ones you want to do first. Also, find out what’s the highest level you can take at the moment. The first few levels are in English, but later on (the higher levels) they’re entirely in Spanish (which is good, because you want to have a lot exposure. Believe me, you want to get to it quickly). Listen every podcast a few times and read along with the dialogue. Also try to mine sentences from the dialogue to add to Anki.

Next thing to do is (if you have a premium account, or when you’re still in the trial period) to copy the sentences from the expansion part to Anki. This won’t take much time, and you’re even learning from quickly seeing the sentences. As Anki supports audio, it might be a nice idea to download and edit the fix (this comes with every podcast, but is premium content) to add the audio of the sentence to the written sentence. The fix contains the loose vocabulary, but it also has each and every example sentence from the expansion tab as audio.

So not a member? Sign up NOW! (Yeah, some blatant advertising from my side, but I mean each and every word of it).

Stay tuned for more b*d-*ss material tips!