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For those of you studying or wanting to study for the Spanish CLEP, but not eager to shell out a few hundred for some of the standard study aids, I thought I'd share a program I came across and am going to start using. The upper levels cost (but are very reasonably priced), but the first level is offered for free.
Learn Spanish Free Online! Free Online Course
Someone who actually knows Spanish would have to testify to the quality of the program, but thought I'd toss it out there.
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For another free option, I'm using Duolingo on my iPad for French right now and it's pretty great. They have Spanish and German too.
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The real trick to learning a language doesn't lie in any one program, rather in a combination approach. It took me YEARS to learn Spanish.. no joke. I took it all throughout grade and high school and even took 2 AP classes (AP Spanish and AP Spanish lit) yet when I moved to Mexico in 1996, I could barely speak or be understood.
Contrasting that to my experience with Portuguese - it took me about 6 months for the basics. I'm a couple of years into it and use it professionally for emails, webinars, and even in-person meetings. Granted, my Spanish helps quite a bit, but it can also slow me down in areas where the two languages differ.
The difference is that with Portuguese, I knew that a single approach wouldn't work. I got traditional books to learn conjugations of basic verbs - my fave is 501 Portuguese verbs, which they have in other languages. Then, I made sure I knew the pronouns and possessive pronouns really well. I started watching programs in Portuguese, used language-exchanges.org to find Skype partners in Brazil who would exchange 15 minutes of conversation in Portuguese for the same in English, downloaded podcasts, got Rosetta Stone, and many, many other methods. Yes, I eventually paid a private tutor, but that's only because I had to actually go to Brazil and do some pretty big meetings and I needed to rush. However, I was able to jump ahead quite a bit due to the variety of methods I used. You really have to immerse yourself and think in the language, which is fun but not easy.
Regarding DuoLingo: Be careful. I used it a bit for French and found it to be about the same as Rosetta Stone with one MAJOR exception. I think it may be pulled out of Google translate or some other random program because it doesn't always make sense. The sentences were occasionally random. I understand French quite well due to my other languages and a lot of work in France and N. Africa, so I knew right away that the lessons were weird, so it wasn't a big deal, but it would have been very confusing trying to understand what they were saying otherwise. DuoLingo is good about 70% of the time, just know that if you get stuck, it's probably not you.. it's their weird translation and unusual topics for sentences.
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I took French in high school, and I'm using it to brush up. I have only used it for about an hour, but didn't really see anything that didn't make sense. Obviously, some of the early sentences are not helpful or full sentences. Calling "La femme et l'homme" a "sentence" is generous.
I turned off the speech recognition tasks, because 1) they're not going to help me on a CLEP exam, and 2) they don't seem to work well. They gave me credit for ones where I gave up, and also failed to recognize times where I was saying it perfectly.
But, I mean, come on. It's free. At the very least it's helpful for vocabulary retention.
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I have started using DuoLingo to learn Spanish, but it is limited in the available languages at this time. Even though I have just started, there's a few notable errors in the pronunciation of certain words. That might be due to the dialect differences.
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I'm not sure of the value for passing the CLEP, but if you want to develop proficiency speaking the language then verbling is a great way to connect with native speakers and practice.
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04-10-2014, 06:49 PM
(This post was last modified: 04-10-2014, 06:57 PM by Johann.)
mrs.b Wrote:... I thought I'd share a program I came across and am going to start using. Learn Spanish Free Online! Free Online Course
I'm glad I looked. The freebie Spanish looks well-organized. Bonus! It had a link to "Babbel" which also offers free lessons in Polish, which I'm trying to learn now.
Jak dobrze! (How great!)
Johann
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