Took 2 years of Spanish in high school. I still remember a lot of vocabulary and rules from back then. Would like to try to really learn it now. As a point of reference, I am 23 and in law school. How should I go about learning Spanish? Classes? Audio courses? I have no idea, but I'd like to start learning in the spring or summer. Has anybody here learned a 2nd language later in life? Ideas/suggestions?
Go to a Spanish speaking country, perhaps Mexico, for an intense language study. Listen to the radio, watch t.v. and read the paper in Spanish. Asi lo puedes aprender.
This is the best. You'll have no choice but learn and they'll dog you for crappy pronunciation I heard. Go there for the summer or something. I have friends who went to Arab countries (Egypt, Syria) to learn Arabic over the summer or as a foreign exchange.. it has worked very well for them.
Or you can go to my neighborhood.. there's a lot of Spanish speaking people here. They're very nice too.
For some strange reason, the episode of X-Files where Agent Doggett wakes up in a South American country comes to mind in this thread.
On a more detailed note. learn sentence patterns where you can insert new nouns and verbs like Because.........therefore......... Although.........however......... If..........then.............. Most important is to memorize things you want to say and then repeat them over and over and over till you puke. What I mean is, like, write and memorize a speech on like, explaining what you're family is like or where you're from or whatever it is you want to talk about but memorize the sentences as independent parts of it. Then practice to yourself mixing the sentences around. You do this on enough topics for long enough (and it takes a bit of time), eventually you'll find you can talk about a lot of stuff and have a foundation for learning more. This also helps in learning the grammar. Buy a computer program or something I guess.
I also took Spanish in high school and in college. I remembered bits and pieces, but would hardly consider myself able to speak the language. I was in Peru this past August. I was SHOCKED at how quickly it came back. I still couldn't speak Spanish, mind you, but with relatively limited vocabulary and being in a country where it was necessary to speak Spanish, in the end I was more than able to communicate with others. I other words: You wanna speak it fluently? Go there for a bit. Especially if you have some base of knowledge.
They had every language of Rosetta Stone available for free leech on What.cd a few days ago. I downloaded the whole 18 GB file in about a day.
Rosetta Stone works like this. It shows you four pictures, and reads you a word in whatever language you want to learn and you pick the correct picture. As you progress, it starts giving you small sentences, then large sentences and so on. I did the first few lessons in Japanese, but got busy and never finished it. Glad you brought up Spanish. I need to get on that one as well.
Go work in a restaurant and get to know the cooks. I learned more spanish working at Pappasitos for 9 months than I did in 4 years of spanish in school. Rosetta Stone is also good. I was using it to learn Swedish but I haven't done it in a long time because I've been so busy with work.
Sounds kind of like the Suzuki method, except it’s for Spanish instead of strings. I took it in high school and college, but if you don’t use it all the time, you lose it. I learned more Spanish at Enterprise talking to our car-prep guys than I did in any classroom. Plus they teach you all the best curse-words.
