Teach Yourself Spanish Fast

If you want to teach yourself Spanish quickly, I strongly recommend that you buy Rocket Spanish Premium. In my previous post I provided a relatively detailed overview of the course, so here I’m just going to discuss how I personally used it to teach myself conversational Spanish in just over two months (BTW, you can also watch my brief video tour of Rocket Spanish Premium).

You’re certainly not going to become fluent in two months but, if you follow the method I outline here, being able to understand and speak conversational Spanish within a couple of months is a very realistic goal. As I discussed in my previous post, Stage 1 of Rocket Spanish Premium includes 40 lessons and Stage 2 includes an additional 22 lessons (excluding the Review and 10 bonus lessons), for a total of 62 lessons. If you commit to doing one lesson every day, you’ll finish all of the lessons in two months.

However, as is the case with any learning experience, the more you put in the more you get out. The course contains a lot of additional resources, so if all you do is one lesson per day you won’t get through all of the additional material within two months.

Here are a few helpful tips:

• Set aside at least 45-60 minutes every day at the same time
• If you can’t do the lesson at your reserved time, do it as soon as you can (I think morning is best because it gives you all day to make up the lesson if necessary)
• Use all of the time you’ve set aside. Either go through the lesson again, start another lesson, or use one of the software tools)
• Use headphones or earbuds so you won’t be interrupted
• If you have a little idle time later in the day, go back and do the lesson again!

If you want to teach yourself Spanish quickly, effectively and affordably, get Rocket Spanish Premium and follow the suggestions above. Buena suerte! (Good luck!)

Tags: conversational Spanish, learn Spanish, teach yourself Spanish

As I mentioned in my previous post comparing the formats of Spanish courses I’ve used, I strongly recommend that you buy Rocket Spanish Premium. For the money, it is hands down the best course that I’ve found to teach yourself Spanish and in this post I’ll share some of the details about what makes it so effective, at least for me.

Rocket Spanish Premium is divided into two main sections, or stages. Stage 1 equips you with basic survival phrases as your hosts take you on a journey through the streets of Spain. In Stage 2 you delve deeper into the language and culture of Spain as you learn how to converse in various social situations (at the beach, a dinner party, the supermarket, etc). The course claims that at the end of Stage 2 “you will have the language skills to speak with confidence in a variety of situations” and I found that to be a very realistic claim.

Each stage is divided into multiple areas of focus, and each area is divided into individual lessons. Each area of focus (the very first one is Greeting, Meeting, Food, and Drink) includes a multiple-lesson Interactive Audio Course followed by a multiple-lesson Grammar and Culture section. I ended up really enjoying the culture parts in all of the Grammar and Culture lessons because it really helped to keep my motivation up by making me think (and dream) about all interesting places I would love to go to practice my Spanish.

The interactive audio lessons are generally about 20-25 minutes long, with a few being shorter or longer than that. The audio recordings are all very professional and the sound quality is excellent. You can just play them right from the website, which is what I usually did, or you can download each audio lesson and save it on your computer. That’s a nice feature because it allows you to load the audio onto a portable player and do (or redo) the lessons from anywhere.

Each lesson includes a quiz, which I found very helpful to let me know how I was doing, and a place to take notes. Although I rarely used the notes feature, I appreciated that it was there when I did want to use it. Since writing things down is supposed to provide better retention, it seems like the notes area is a simple but effective way to improve the learning experience. Stage 1 includes a total of 40 lessons followed by a Stage 1 Certificate Test.

Stage 2 include three more areas of focus with Interactive Audio Courses and Grammar and Culture sections, followed by an audio recording of all of the conversations from the entire course for review, ten bonus lessons on vocabulary and pronunciation, four interactive software programs, and a couple more bonus lessons (for a total of 34 lessons), and finally the Stage 1 Certificate Test. The interactive software includes two programs (vocabulary and understanding spoken Spanish) that you download and run on your computer (available for both Mac and PC) and two fun flash card games that you play online.

Overall, this is a very well designed course. If you’re looking for a fun, effective and very affordable way to learn conversational Spanish, try Rocket Spanish Premium.

Tags: conversational Spanish, learn Spanish, teach yourself Spanish

Courses to teach yourself Spanish come in numerous formats such as audio recordings (e.g., CDs), books, software, and various combinations of those. I’ve tried several Spanish courses over the years and in this post I’ll share my findings about what course formats I’ve found to be most helpful.

Originally I just tried learning Spanish from books but, while pretty affordable, it just didn’t work for me because I couldn’t understand how to pronounce things properly. While books can offer phonetic spelling to help with that, I quickly decided that I needed to hear someone speaking.

The first audio courses I tried were popular (and expensive) pre-packaged courses, where the only additional resource that came with the audio CDs was a thin booklet. Although I enjoyed the courses much more than the books, I never seemed to learn as quickly as I wanted nor could I retain the information very well. I would inevitably stop applying myself for a while and, when I came back to it, I would have to back way up, often to the very beginning. I tried using flash cards (purchased separately) along with the audio and that helped a little with my retention but it didn’t seem to do much for improving the speed at which I could learn Spanish.

Then software-based courses started coming out to pretty positive reviews, offering audio and visual learning opportunities as well as some new more interactive methods. However, these courses are very expensive. Fortunately, my local library had one so I took it out and gave it a go. The more interactive nature of the software course made it my most enjoyable Spanish learning experience so far, and I felt like I was off to a better start than ever before. However, after renewing the course a couple of times from the library, I had to take it back because the library limited the number of times I could keep it in a row. I couldn’t afford to buy the course so my only other option would be to go to the library every day, and even that wouldn’t work if someone else took the course home.

I was pretty disappointed since I felt like I had finally found a course that was working for me but I couldn’t afford it. However, a year or so later I was sharing my Spanish learning frustration with a friend and she told me about another option that combined audio and software for a more reasonable price. The way they keep it less expensive is that it’s available as a web-based classroom with downloadable audio and software. That way they don’t have to pay the cost of packaging and they can pass the savings on to their customers. Since they offered a free 6-day course, I thought I’d give it a go even though I was somewhat skeptical (just my nature I guess). The bottom line is that I was impressed with the free 6-day course and they offered a 60-day money back guarantee on the full course (Rocket Spanish Premium) so I pulled the trigger and bought the full version. The end of this story is that I found the course to offer all of the benefits of the software-based course for a small fraction of the price. If, like me, you’ve been frustrated with your previous efforts to teach yourself Spanish, I strongly recommend that you buy Rocket Spanish Premium. I’ve already written more than I expected here so I’ll create another post to talk about the course in more detail.

Tags: conversational Spanish, learn Spanish, teach yourself Spanish