If you really want to learn Spanish. try Duolingo

I concur Duolingo is quite good.

Xavier_Onassis said:

As a language professor for over 40 years, I decided I was wasting far too much of my time on political websites, which is useful to me only to practice my self-expression. So I decided to try the DuoLingo course in German for English speakers. I was greatly impressed.

I don't think it will be 100% effective in making me a conversationalist in German, but I think with a good textbook after I complete the Duolingo course, I will be able to make myself understood in standard German.

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https://www.duolingo.com/comment/2585813

I use it every day for learing Spanish. Apart from the language drills there are documents that you can translate or review the translations of other people. I recommend it.

I think it's great to start out, no doubt!

Totally agree. My spouse has been using it daily for the last few months and it's amazing how much was learned. Now I need to get on it.


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On Providenciales some 11 years ago, I was trying to learn some Spanish. I'd spent $300.00 some odd dollars on Rosetta Stone that ended up being a total waste of my money. My Dominican cleaning lady use to come into my apartment at Turtle Cove Landing during the week while I was working, so I never saw her. I just left the $50.00 on the table, and she locked up when she was done. One week, she wanted to come on Saturday morning instead. No big deal to me, so Saturday it was. As she was ironing my shirts and things, I was sitting at my desk practicing my Spanish with Rosetta Stone. In very broken English, she asked; You try and speak Spanish? I shook my head yes. She followed up with; you no speak it that way. I asked then how? In true Dominican form, she offered to teach me Spanish and insisted I would learn more Spanish in a week with her teaching me than I had using Rosetta Stone for the sum of $200.00. We haggled back and forth and agreed that I'd pay her $100.00 after one week if it was true. She agreed. Now I'd been trying to learn Spanish for awhile now, and things were not going very well, so I figured what do I have to lose. Funny thing is that all she taught me to earn that $100.00 was the Spanish alphabet. Of course it wasn't a snap, and I had to stop and think about how to form the words, but it made sense to me that the one song that all English speaking people know no matter where they are from is the Alphabet song so why should learning Spanish be any different? Long story short, I hired her as a tutor and she taught me the basic verb skills and sentence structures and I learned very quickly. I'm a firm believer that no matter what format one uses to learn Spanish, the Alphabet must come first. You have to learn to crawl before you can walk..

We were using Duloingo for a while , but stopped . Yes, it does teach you Spanish , but nothing beats actual converstions with native speakers.
Grandma used to say " you can't learn to ride a bicycle by reading a book" . You go out there , listen to conversations , try speaking the language to build confidence in comunicating in Spanish - most people will correct you if you say the wrong words ...because you are actually trying.

Learning by interaction with Spanish speakers was actually more effective , we found , *because you retain more . You can answer every question on Duolingo correctly and still forget most of what you learnt . We also used to listen to rtve.es and cnn espanol news chanels regularly .

I guess Duolingo taught us to "crawl" , but interaction with Spanish speakers was what made us " walk" (fluent) .

I went the other way about it.

Learned spanish by speaking with the locals. I had no choice but to learn it that way. As i didnt speak spanish and live in the dr :/.
To a point where I could actually pretend to speak dominican campo style. But thats all it is, its pretending. All you are doing is parrotting what you hear, what you use daily.

But its one thing to go about every day life, shopping, gossiping, etc...... and another to actually learn correct spanish.
The number of stuff that i see on duolingo and go " ohhhhhh thats how its written/used/really means ".

By no means am I fluent in spanish ( well there again it depends what 1 calls fluent ), but duolingo certainly helped at some point.