I’m wanting to start learning Spanish, and I’m looking for a free option that isn’t Duolingo.
I don’t like the gamey fomo aspect of it.
Anyone have a favorite place they found?
Language Transfer is free and teaches you why the language is the way it is rather than just memorization.
My recollection is you can get to a 3000 word conversational level much faster than via straight memorization (ex. Duolingo).
This looks awesome! Never heard of this one before.
Second this. It gives a really good baseline.
I also want to learn Spanish. I’ll check it out too.
Language transfer is amazing! Gets you to a level where you can start learning on your own - I was able to start reading children’s books in spanish and work my up from there.
The Italian course is also excellent, gave me enough skills to feel comfortable traveling & speaking Italian
I second this too. I listened to all 90 episodes of the Spanish course.
Thank you! I’m also going to check it out, I had been trying to use duo lingo to learn French but it was pure garbage.
To practice listening, dreaming Spanish has a ton of videos spoken slowly for different levels. There’s a YouTube channel and a website: https://www.dreaming.com/spanish
I love Dreaming Spanish too! So far I have 150 hours on there.
Thank you!
It’s paid once you get to intermediate level, but the beginner stuff is nearly all free
I don’t think so. There’s definitely free stuff all the way to the top, maybe less of it.
At least when I did it.
Huh, didn’t realize that. They definitely have some intermediate videos on YouTube for free but I guess not as many as on their page.
This is how I got to fluency over the last 2 years. Highly recommend.
This lady, Butterfly Spanish. And Anki flashcards - the app seems really backwards at first but it really works.
I agree that Duolingo is annoying. Felt like I got somewhere with it but it wastes so much of your time.
Do you know of a good spanish Anki deck?
Thank you!
Edit: is this the right flash card app?
That is the correct one, yep! You can also get it from F-Droid!
Cool, thanks!
Anki is incredible if you use it regularly. Super customisable as well
A vocab primer pdf or website with like 200 of the most common words and phrases & listening to people talk is probably going to get you through the majority of conversations. Word frequency in natural language follows a Zipf’s law distribution, so focusing on the most common words & phrases first is very efficient.
Practice, spaced repetition, and quizzing for memorization and long term retention. Beyond that learning verb conjugations and maybe a English/Spanish book that has one language on the left page and the other on the right for more expanded vocab and variety.
TIL: https://comparelanguageapps.com/index.html
Evidence-Based Language Learning Research
Discover which language learning apps actually work through rigorous statistical analysis by Dr. Roumen Vesselinov and his team.
I always imagined that if I really wanted to learn Spanish without living among Spanish speakers, I’d put on Family Guy or some other show with simple English and that has good subs and dubs. Then either use English audio with Spanish subs and perhaps after getting used to it a bit Spanish dubs with English subs. And after getting the hang of basics, Spanish with Spanish dubs. As Family Guy is so simple you’d get the context from the show, know a word here and there and your brain fills in the holes. Not at first, and then quite badly, but I think if you have like the very basics down, like a weeks course or something, and then you just start binging a show you know like that, constantly on the background, I’d assume you’d be a somewhat functional speaker in a year or two at least. Or you’ll just learn what “giggity” is in Spanish and nothing else. Either or. Or something in between. Or not.
Nevermindme just passing by I’ve no actual suggestions
Pimsleur works well for that.
Find a hobby that your interested in and then just go going a primarily Spanish based message board or discord or whatever group.
