Spanish Archives

To learn through osmosis, I visited a few Spanish chat rooms today. My favorite was Espanglish Chat because it’s made specifically for Spanish and English learners. But I found that chat rooms are not the best method to learn Spanish; between the typos and Spanish internet slang, I hardly knew what people were saying! That said, it’s still good practice.

I finally reached the point where relearning Spanish is giving me a headache. As if all the different tenses weren’t enough, I also have to learn when to use the different grammatical moods! If you’re like me and English was your first language, the whole concept is anything but intuitive.

Relearning Spanish has been working pretty well, but vocabulary is my greatest weakness. I bet there are Spanish parrots out there that know more words than I do!

False friends are words that seem like they should have the same meaning when they really don’t. For example, you might think that embarazada means embarrassed, but it actually means pregnant.

I reviewed some basic grammar and breezed right through it, thanks to these sites!

Now, I’m already pretty familiar with Spanish grammar after four years of classes. I forgot almost all the vocabulary and the many conjugations of verbs, but I still understand the basic grammar. So here’s a super-quick summary of what I remember.

Vocabulary, vocabulary, vocabulary. There’s lots of it, so the sooner I start, the better. Here are some sites I’m using to learn more Spanish words.

Here are some sites that explain the rules for using accent marks in Spanish.

The Spanish alphabet is very similar to the English alphabet, but the nice thing about Spanish is that pronunciation and spelling are much more predictable. Here’s an overview of the Spanish alphabet with a couple useful links.