Hi All,

(This is a koohii Lounge post, so, please don't flame me for being somewhat off topic from Japanese!)

I've been studying Japanese pretty diligently for about two years now and I feel like I've learned a lot about how to approach learning a language. One thing I've learned is that learning a language to fluency takes a lot of time, so instead of telling myself I'll learn Spanish "next" I'm trying to get started with that language _now_, however slow my start may be.

So here are some random thoughts of mine:

1) There is a massive, massive amount of really unhelpful, kind of misdirected and/or inefficient language learning material out there.

2) When googling up "learning Japanese" I find a plethora of personal blogs, structured web sites, podcasts, recommendations, forums -- more or less a thriving community of self-learners. When I google up "learning Spanish" I get a lot of paid program advertisements and what seems like a lot more spam and commercial learning stuff (probably due to the larger Spanish language market?).

So, the obvious questions are:
1) "What're the recommended texts for serious, language-lovin' students starting off in Spanish?"
2) "What're the Tae-Kim guide, RtK forum, AJATT, Core6K Anki resource equivalents (if any) floating around the net?" [the smart.fm Spanish Core2K is whack as far as I can tell]
3) "Is there any advice or obvious pitfalls to watch out for, as a native English speaker that has studied Japanese but never a romance language?"

I've found this one text with high Amazon.com reviews, but any product with the vibe of "new magical way to learn easily!" sounds like snake oil to me so I'm automatically skeptical: http://www.amazon.com/Madrigals-Magic-Ke...0385410956

Anyway, I'm really, really excited to study a language that will be, relative to Japanese, effortless to read and comes with so much latent familiarity. If anyone here is a fan of studying Spanish and Japanese or has experience therein and wants to share their two cents please do.

Thanks for your time!

K.

If you move two states down, you'll probably inadvertently learn it in about a year...

"Madrigal's Magic Key to Spanish" is very good, but it's pretty old.

I recommend to to start with "Assimil Spanish with Ease". Excellent course. It won't take more than 4-6 months to reach B2 level in Spanish.

"Spanish Master List" from Glossaria is a good equivalent of Core2k, but it's 1k.

Glossaria Master lists have been designed to give any learner an arsenal of words he can use to define or describe nearly any concept in his target language(s).

Common European Framework of Reference for Languages Wrote:B2 Level = Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in his/her field of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party. Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

All I know about Spanish self-study is that Nemotoad once linked me to Ramses' (who posted here once or twice thus I'm mentioning them as a fellow forum user ;p) blog: http://www.spanish-only.com/ - The context was an article outlining how to snag sentences w/ audio from the spanishpod.com type sites (in my case, "A friend of a friend" used this information and frequency lists to create an Anki deck of thousands of text/audio French sentences, a French Core 2000 if you will).

http://www.spanish-only.com/2009/10/fren...ces-audio/

Further directions: http://spanishpod.com/tools/glossary/entry/[insert Spanish word here]

Spanish-only.com has a database of currently 4,396 Spanish sentences: http://www.spanish-sentences.com/

Grammar: http://www.studyspanish.com/tutorial.htm

Having studied Spanish in highschool, I can say that there's only 2 ways learning Japanese will have helped you:

1) You already broke most of the rules of what you thought language was. There's a couple more for Spanish that weren't broken by Japanese, but it won't be a problem.

2) You gained an idea of what it takes to learn a language and the study habits required, no matter what method you use. (This even goes for AJATT... Er... ASATT.)

You'll find that in the US, there's a lot better access to Spanish materials than Japanese. You'll find many more classes, textbooks, books, movies, radio, and more. You'll also find more websites, and that Google does a better job auto-translating.

The only thing I think you might not find is the community. EN->JP has a community like I've never seen before. It's incredibly inclusive and helpful, and amazingly short on actual bickering and trolling.

If I were going to study Spanish at this point (starting from scratch), I'd probably find an Anki deck with audio (or maybe LiveMocha), a pronunciation guide, a short grammar guide... And then go to LingQ and start reading. If I weren't starting from scratch (and I'm not, since I had 2 years of it in high school) then I'd go right to LingQ.

Try http://www.200words-a-day.com/ for vocabulary. It's kind of like Heisig, only a bit more advanced.

There are so many resources!
Here's a handful of links.

Pronunciation
http://www.elearnspanishlanguage.com/pro...index.html

Audiobooks
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=525
http://www.audiolibro.es/
http://vagos.es/forumdisplay.php?f=206
http://ska4ka.com/es-audio/

Parallel novels
http://www.bilingual-texts.com/library/spanish/
http://albalearning.com/audiolibros/exup...ipito.html

E-novels
http://greylib.align.ru/?category=spanish

Handbooks
http://uz-translations.net/?category=spanish
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=1358

Podcasts, line-by-line audio
(Register for free, they have Spanish there, too)
http://chinesepod.com/lessons
http://www.japanesepod101.com/

Simple introduction, 2000 expressions, line-by-line audio
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/index.htm

Texts with audio
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/spanish/
http://gloss.dliflc.edu/search.aspx
http://www.scola.org/Scola/Default.aspx
http://www.jw.org/

This is why I love this forum -- you guys are great. I posted this last night and then went to sleep, this is my first time checking back and now I feel like I have more direction and resources than I will ever need. Thanks so much!

K.

buonaparte Wrote:Simple introduction, 2000 expressions, line-by-line audio
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/index.htm

I forgot about that; book2 is a good resource. It's available in quite a variety of languages, including Japanese: http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EN/ENJA/ENJA002.HTM

cool thread,im gonna start learning spanish soon too

Off topic)

I'm personally never going to take Spanish because I hated how it's practically the only one available in my school and how it takes over the other langauges. (I also hated the "You're going to need to when immigrants live in your area." argument. If you are going to live in a community centered on English, you should probably learn the langauge. I have nothing wrong with the immigrants themselves, but the people who try to make it easier, only to make them more handicaped. It doesn't make any sense.)

On Topic)

Anyways, I like the ___pod series. The Japanesepod was too eye-twitchingly corny but it has a great Chinese and Korean programs. So I reccomend taking the tour to see if you like it. (http://spanishpod.com/tour)

Here is another website I found. It's compltely free and has dozens of lessons with audio about grammar, vocab and pronunciation. (http://www.studyspanish.com/pronunciation/)

Good luck with Spanish! I'm sure you will do well.

Cool Spanish and Japanese — The two languages I love most (great choice ! Try Michel Thomas, probably available on iTunes?? He does other languages too but they're not all great, however the Spanish course works really well. Dare I say it: it makes learning Spanish nigh on effortless...

hi all

I've checked the above links but can't quite find what I want.

I am looking for the equvilent of this kind of real easy, entry level phrase book

http://www.amazon.com/Easy-Spanish-Phras...0486280861


online w/ audio that I can make an anki deck out of.

anyone recs?

European languages are incredibly easy to learn, compared to Japanese. First of all the writing system isn't an issue, so instead of wasting months on that you can jump straight into vocab/grammar/sentences. If I were you I'd start SrSing vocab and going through basic grammar, then I would SrS sentences to illustrate the new grammar. I'd also start visiting Spanish websites and read the news in Spanish, you'd be near fluent in a matter of months if you were to keep at it I'm sure.

You didn't try that Spanish Only glossary thingy? As I commented above, I used that trick (frequency list + searches via URL/regex stuff) to great effect to create a deck with easy sentences and audio. I mean, a friend used it.

It's too bad though, European languages are so much harder than languages like Japanese, because of the alphabetic writing system and its impoverished semantic aspect which makes learning words so difficult. So, good luck with that. ;p

Notes in Spanish has an incredible podcast library. Very helpful stuff.

I did Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses as well. I have three years of high school Spanish and my native language is quite similar to Spanish as well so I had an advantage when it came to vocab.

There is also this: A First Spanish Reader. It will do you well if you try and peruse an entry a day.

Some nice links here, but what i am missing are ready made decks with audio, sentence or single vocab, which would definately help in the beginning.

Could anyone help me out here? There must be some decks out there...

Not sure if you guys are interested in this, but it's a multilingual text-to-speech pack from Ivona (English, Spanish, German, and French). I use a couple of the (British) English voices all the time and they are pretty listenable. The other ones sound pretty good too. I use them for listening to all sorts of documents (including threads in this forum) while on the go (doing dishes, bicycling, etc). Anyway, it's not free, but they have a special going on for the next week, so I'm thinking of getting it since I'll be starting Spanish when I get back to the States in November. (I guess I can use it for my French as well.) I'm still waiting for the Japanese voice though! But perhaps that's a little more difficult to implement.