So this post was totally supposed to be up on Wednesday, but then I had things due in at uni and I completely forgot about it! I only remembered today, oops!
Still, it’s a short one. Because I’ve chosen Spanish as my target language for the 6 Week Challenge, I’m just going to share with you all some of the resources I’ve been using. Hopefully you’ll find them as useful as I do!
Memrise and Anki – if you’re looking to learn vocabulary quickly and effectively, I’d give either of these a try. Memrise is based online; you can join a course or create your own and it uses a spaced repetition system (SRS) to help you to learn new words. I’m using the Spanish 101 course and finding it particularly useful. Anki also uses an SRS, but it’s a program you can download and use offline (though if you’re online, it syncs your progress to the server so you can use the web-based version if you’re not at home). You can get shared decks in Anki too, though I prefer to make my own, because then I know I’m learning vocabulary I have at least seen before.
BBC Mundo – there are plenty of other sources for reading materials, but I use BBC Mundo a lot. Mostly, this is because I don’t know where else to go; but also because the news articles aren’t too long (my reading speed is… not great). As well as just having articles, there are also plenty of videos. If you have twitter, there’s a twitter feed to follow too; I find following them on twitter handy because then I get even more practice ;).
Fluencia – admittedly, I’ve only used Fluencia briefly and it appears to be a subscription-based service now, but it seems quite useful, particularly if you’re learning Latin American Spanish. It seems to be based on Rosetta Stone-type activities – there are a lot of pictures – so I figure it’ll be useful for some of you.
SpanishDict and dict.cc – I use dict.cc a lot more for German than for Spanish (and it’s a lot better for German), but the Spanish version appears to be getting there. SpanishDict is the dictionary I use most often for Spanish, but I sometimes find it difficult to find the words I want and then it likes to use machine translators. *sigh*
DramaFever – this site does seem to have problems if you’re outside of the US (but there are ways around that… ), but it has a nice selection of Spanish-language TV shows. I’m particularly enjoying Aguila Roja right now. Viki is another alternative, though I don’t know how good their Spanish-language collection is.
Mmm, that’s more or less all that I’m using; that and an Assimil course. I’ll have another post (a song~) up tomorrow and then I’ll talk about the halfway point of the 6 Week Challenge on Sunday (spoiler: I’ve been doing better this year than I usually do, despite the unusually high workload I’ve had from uni). In the meantime, do you have any other good resources for Spanish – or for any other languages you’re learning? Let me know; I’m always excited to find new things!