Learn Spanish Online

I want to help you learn as much Spanish as possible (or English, if you’re a Spanish speaker).

The Newsletter

It’s free. I send it out (almost) every week day. Every day, it’s about something different. Everyday it contains 10 Spanish words and 3 phrases for you to translate, using those words. If you click on the link in every e-mail, you can:

  1. listen to me pronounce the words of the day for you;
  2. watch a short YouTube clip on that topic, in Spanish;
  3. type in your answers;
  4. read and think about others’ answers.

On the following day—after everyone has had time to think a bit—I post my suggestions and correct all your attempts.

Why is it daily and why does it contain 10 word and 3 phrases?

Because it works. I noticed, after a few years of teaching busy professionals in their busy offices that, if I didn’t physically go and interrupt them once a week, they would never learn any English at all. They are just too busy with work, life, families, kids, gym, unread books and all the rest of it.

But they do still check their e-mails several times a day.

Just by opening the e-mail for 30 seconds, you can learn a new word or revise one you knew. If you have a couple of minutes, think about how to use the words in the phrases.

5 minutes more? No problem, click through and type in your suggestions and have me correct them the following day.

If you do that, you’re already learning more Spanish online. You get some good quality feedback, and correction for free, too.

Why is it free?

Well, that’s how the internet works: give something useful to me for free and I’ll pay more attention to you.

Why do I want you to pay attention to me?

Well, I think that you can learn even more Spanish online and that I can help you do it. I want you to pay a small monthly fee to for that bit.

The Articles

Each article is written and translated into English and Spanish, by me, so you can be sure that it’s done correctly. That bit is also free.

When you become one of my online students, you can also access lots of extra learning materials to make the most of each article.

You can click on an audio player and listen to me read each article out loud as you read the text. There’s also a slower version of each audio recording, because the first thing some of my students said to me when they listened was: “Er, that’s a bit fast for me, can you do a slower version?”

You can download a hand-crafted, translated vocabulary list for each article, so that you can look up tricky words and phrases as you read and listen. The cool thing about me making this list by hand for you is that a) it flows with the article and b) you can look up whole bits of useful phrases and not just individual words, like you do in a dictionary.

Once you’ve listened to and read the text, and started to learn some new Spanish words and phrases, you’ll want to try and move them from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary (so you can actually use them when you speak and write Spanish.)

There are three further exercises you can use to do this with for each article:

  1. Vocabulary exercises: so you get used to recognising and transforming Spanish words;
  2. Phrase worksheets: beginner, intermediate and advanced—with which you can practice common verb tenses and phrase structures with the vocabulary you’re learning;
  3. A forum conversation: here you can leave a written comment about that topic. I’ll correct the first 100 words or so for you.

All of the answers are there for you too, so you can check on how you’ve done. You can download and printout all of the texts, vocabulary lists and worksheets. You can download the mp3 audio files and listen to them on your IPod or in the car.

The Community

There are currently lots of people signing up for this: almost 700 newsletter subscribers and over 100 people in the forum.

I’m starting to see interesting ways in which, as more people start interacting with what I’m doing, we’ll be able to do even more fun stuff to learn Spanish and English…

…what if, for example, the people who are learning English and the people who are learning Spanish hook up together on Skype and become virtual buddies, and use the learning materials I’m producing to help each other improve their pronunciation…?

There will be lots of new ideas in the future.