Hola! Bonjour! Ciao! I’m here to share 3 tools I have been using to help me practice my Spanish language. As I’ve grown older and done more traveling I have learned the appeal to learning languages. Although 98% of anywhere I went this summer I found someone speaking English, there is just something awesome about being able to speak the native language like the locals. Like most people growing up in Florida, I took Spanish in middle school and high school since those were the requirements. I’m it sure if it is because we knew we had to take it or just a lack of appreciation for language in general but I like most of my peers never really took that studying seriously. Now years later I find myself wanting to study Spanish on my own to hopefully become fluent in the future.
To keep my Spanish skills from getting too rusty, I mostly use Duolingo.
Their app has short lessons to learn vocab and grammar and they also have an “immersion” feature on their desktop page where you can translate articles. And, fun fact, Duolingo actually partners with sites to use learners translations to translate the Internet. Multitasking at its finest. Also, it’s not just for Spanish! Duolingo has basically any language you could even think of learning. French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Irish and more. At one point I was practicing Spanish, and studying the basics of German and Italian all at the same time! It keeps track of how many points per day you accomplish also making it easy and fun to stay on track and reach your learning goals.
When I used to have a long commute to work I discovered how great the SpanishPod101 podcast is. With levels from absolute beginner to intermediate and everything in between the short lessons make it easy to fit in learning it almost any situation. There’s a few other language podcasts that are good but I definitely found that SpanishPod101 was the easiest to follow. Plus they have all the transcripts to follow along online!
Lastly, there’s Language Zen. I just found this one the other week but I really like their option to learn through Spanish songs! It breaks down each lyric and is a fun and different way to learn.
I’ve been trying to study language for about 20-30 minutes per day. Hopefully once you check out these fun tools you will join me!
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