best website to learn spanish “Finally! An Easy Way to Get By in Spanish – And You Only Need 138 Words“ Click Here 👈 Choose your...
best website to learn spanish
“Finally! An Easy Way to Get By in Spanish – And You Only Need 138 Words“ Click Here 👈
today I'm sharing all of my favorite Spanish resources that I have used since the very beginning up to where I am now which is about C1 I guess and I am super excited because there's going to be some resources that I never see anyone talk about as always timestamps are going to be in the description so if there's anything particular that you are interested in feel free to jump to that part but before we begin just so that we are on the same page I just wanted to recap my Spanish Learning Journey a little bit for you I started learning Spanish completely by myself and after four years of on and off studying I got somewhere to A2 borderline B1 and then I went to a language School in Spain and I studied there up until B 2.1 which is officially where the course ended don't feel discouraged by the fact that I just mentioned a language school and like literally move into Spain because some of the resources that my teachers used at that school I am going to share with you today and then after that I have been mostly maintaining my Spanish by watching listening to and reading a lot of different things in Spanish and then in 2021 I also did a language Sprint with lingoda which is an online school I think at that time I took about 45 classes with them which were mostly speaking oriented and so now even though I've never taken the daily test official really I feel like my level is somewhere around C1 so first let's talk about how I started something that is important to know about my Spanish Learning Journey is that Spanish was the first language that I attempted to study on my own without a teacher and by that time I had already been somewhat successful with Korean I spoke English pretty well but those were languages that I learned in a classroom setting so I had no idea how to approach studying the language on my own and I remember buying a textbook for Spanish opening it and feeling super overwhelmed so I opened the book I looked through the first like 10 pages or so and I just put it away but I still really wanted to study Spanish so what I did was downloading Duolingo and that was like back in 2015 where I feel like it wasn't as popular as it is now and people didn't have such strong opinions as they tend to have now about the app so I tried to use Duolingo for about 20 to 40 minutes a day I feel like I did the whole tree pretty fast even though that was not my goal after doing that I moved on to memorize so it was never my goal to keep a streak I just wanted to learn the basics to hear how the words are pronounced and then move on and I started doing memorize which I liked much more than Duolingo and I think I learned about 2000 words with memorize and I decided to go back to my textbook and this is what I really appreciate about those apps is that they didn't teach me Spanish but I didn't expect them to teach me Spanish they just gave me the confidence that I needed to start learning the language on my own I went back to the textbook and suddenly a lot of things that wouldn't make sense before started making sense and it didn't seem as hard anymore so if you are like me in that regard and you feel really overwhelmed I definitely would recommend those apps I wouldn't recommend using them for too long I guess I really like using them to jumpstart my language learning and then move on to something else before we move on to textbooks I just wanted to tell you that all the resources that I talk about in this video are going to be in this notion database that I created for you guys that I will link in the description and you'll be able to download it completely for free or you can also tip me if you want so I in general really like studying with textbook The Textbook that I used in the beginning was written specifically for Russian speakers but what I found worked best for me was having one comprehensive textbook that teaches all of the most important skills like vocabulary grammar listening Reading Writing and so on I'm a person who gets overwhelmed very easily and so I think having one resource and stick into it was really helpful But whichever textbook you end up choosing I suggest that you look for the following two things in the textbook first of all audio I think it's really important and I don't really think I need to explain why and then the second thing which I don't know I guess it depends on the country I saw this in a lot of Russian textbooks that they wouldn't have answer keys some of the comprehensive textbooks that I see recommended a lot are the teach yourself textbooks and the ones from a simile another option would be to use monolingual textbooks produced in the country where the language is spoken I really like those but again they can be very overwhelming in the beginning my school in Spain for example used a textbook called methodo espanol but one thing to keep in mind is that yet they will have no translations and another thing is that I think a lot of them are written for a classroom setting and you will see a lot of exercises that ask you to discuss things with your partner or just talk about something normally to your teacher I guess even though I just literally said that choosing one textbook and sticking to it works really well one thing that I like doing also is choosing a supplemental material for example in those comprehensive textbooks they either don't really explain grammar well enough or sometimes they just don't give you enough practice so what I really like doing is either using online materials which I will mention later or just get in a textbook specifically for grammar you have probably seen this series recommended a lot and to be honest I don't really like it and I don't really understand why it's that popular I have used a book like this for Italian and I was really mad at it and just looking at the contents of the Spanish book I don't really understand the structure of it and the order in which they organize the topics for example in this book you will learn the subjunctive mood before you learn articles which is I don't know I feel like it's an interesting choice so what would be an alternative my favorite grammar textbook of all time when it comes to Spanish at least is this textbook called gramatica they have books for all levels but one thing to keep in mind is that this book is completely monolingual so all of the explanations of grammar are going to be in Spanish however if that is a deal breaker to you look for beginning Spanish grammar from what I understand it's the same book just with English explanations and even if it's not exactly the same it is very very similar in terms of How It's structured so you basically have theory in one page and then grammar drills on another but if you want to know what other books are available for Spanish Learners there's a video I have which is my language bookshelf tour where I show a lot of different books that I have I really have a lot of them so be sure to check that video if that's something that interests you okay moving on to different online resources that I have used the first one is campus diffusion so this is one of my favorite resources and I would have never known about it had it not been for my teachers in Spain basically in campus de Fusion is a platform that is run by this publisher called diffusion which makes learning materials for people who are learning Spanish and I think campus diffusion is um sort of online platform for tutors of Spanish more than it is for students but even as a Spanish learner you can also use it let me show you some of the materials they have O enclase is a collection of texts about society and culture for levels A1 to B2 here you'll find articles on topics like the rise of podcasts for women or a breakdown of all the ways Shakira disses her ex in her latest songs these materials are constantly updated to reflect what's going on in the world and there's also a version called Americas that discusses things that happen in Latin America specifically a green textbook that you can find on the platform is called bitakora I feel like it focuses a lot on vocabulary but it also has grammar explanations and again discusses pretty interesting topics which for me is always super important because I am just tired of talking about museums like taking tours in the country that you just arrived to and things like that you know also on campus diffusion you can find textbooks for Latin American Spanish for business Spanish for daily preparation and so on what is important to remember though is that this resource is not free unfortunately but you can get a trial of three weeks where you can use it for free and even though there are some materials on the platform that actually can only be used online like the bitakura textbook that I just mentioned there's also a lot of materials for example the Owen classic articles that are available for downloading and in three weeks you can download a lot of things just saying an app that has been really really indispensable for me is Spanish dictionary also known as SpanishDict I know everyone talks about it but it's just so good if you look up a word it will give you the translation example sentences and pronunciation both from Latin America and from Spain another thing you can find here is synonyms and for verbs you will also have conjugations which you can even practice right in the app I feel like a whole video would not be enough to talk about how good this app and also their website are so I'm going to stop here but I definitely think it should be one of the first apps you download if you decide to start learning Spanish and then once you're an intermediate or Advanced learner you can switch to monolingual definitions you can find those on word reference or maybe rice website which Ryan stands for real Academia Espanola if I remember correctly and it's basically this institution that oversees the Spanish language I know sounds weird but they have a dictionary that's all I'm saying another website I really really like is lean Golia lingolia provides grammar explanations and exercises for different languages including Spanish the way they systemize grammar rules is just amazing with explanations examples with grammar drills and although most grammar drills require subscription all of the references are free besides grammar they also teach you vocabulary and they have listening and I think also Reading Comprehension exercises divided by levels but like I said you will have to pay if you want to get access to more grammar drills and I never paid so what I would do is I would just look up the topic that I needed to practice for example and then just the word exercise in Spanish one website that would show up a lot was aprender espanol it looks like it was made in the early 2000s if not before that but it has a ton of exercises and there's also another website where you can specify what exactly you want to practice and then the website will give you a lot of multiple choice questions I do not remember the name but of course I'm gonna put it on the screen is a great website regardless of whether you want to take the daily test or not here too you will find a lot of exercises to practice your Spanish for skills like vocabulary grammar writing listening and so on and if you are studying for the test they also have some useful books like grammar questions or vocabulary that you might find on the test and they're relatively cheap but another useful website would be the official page of the exam where you can find information on the format evaluation criteria and even mock tests for each level another golden resource is profede it's meant for teachers of Spanish as the name States but it's great for self-study too so to find materials here you can choose your level skills you want to practice like grammar or vocabulary or format like podcast video Etc I think you can choose topics too the quality of the materials is just top notch there's explanations there's exercises there's video audio presentations all that stuff also check out their blogs because they publish some interesting stuff there too what else like many people I really like using reversal context specifically for whenever I practice writing if you're not familiar it's a website where you can search for a word and instead of just showing you a definition or the translation of the word what it does is it shows you sentences real actual sentences taken from the internet I imagine where this word was used and it also shows you translation to the language of your choice right it might be your native language might be English whatever you're more comfortable with and so as I have mentioned I really like using it for writing because it shows you how words are used in context and I also often instead of just looking up like one word I will try to make a short phrase or like a couple of words to see if they're used together but you can also do a very similar thing on Google if you search for a phrase but you put it in quotation marks before that tells Google to search for this specific phrase in the very order that you put the words and spelled exactly the same way so what happens is whenever I have doubts about how to say a certain thing more correctly I just do that I search the phrase on Google using quotation marks and then if I have like different options that I think might be right I just kind of try to look at which one has more results and usually that would be the correct one or at least the more common one so far I have mostly been telling you about formal traditional study resources but immersion also known as consuming content in your target language is just as important if not more important which is why I also filmed a video on all the things I read watch and listen to in Spanish and that video hopefully will be up next week so like I said all of the resources I have mentioned in this video are going to be in this notion database that you will find in the description and thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in my next one bye bye ...
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