Patrick’s Spanish Study Methods
By peter on May 20, 2008 in Spanish
I was on the phone with my friend Patrick, who has been my friend for about 12 years, and one of the things we discussed was our study of Spanish. Patrick has gone a little further than I have and I found his description of his study habits interesting. He doesn’t use an SRS program like myself or Thomas, but through his use of Rosetta Stone
The method I’ve been using to learn Spanish so far consists of a grammar book called “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Spanish Phrases
“, and the Rosetta Stone program. I also have a bilingual Spanish dictionary for words i come across that are new.
Rosetta Stone: So far this has had a positive effect for teaching me new words, masculine or feminine gender of words, and sentence structure. It sticks mostly in only one verb tense so far. (The present progressive or gerunds.) I think the subjunctive is more used than any other verb tense, but not sure. The only issue i have with this is that it doesn’t cover much ground being mainly in one tense. It does however make the words stick in your head and its not so repetitive that you get bored with it.
The grammar book: Shows all the verb tenses and when they are used. With example sentences in each tense, you could listen to Rosetta Stone and after a bit start to pick up the slight differences of a word in each tense you just read it in. The best thing about the book is that it is straightforward and simple. If you were to go over the charts for each verb tense and write down a couple of sentences you will start to catch the patterns in it.
Patrick also pointed me to a couple of new resources that he plans to try out soon:
- Livemocha.com - Patrick just signed up for this so he doesn’t have any real feedback about it yet, but it looks like a good language learning social network site.
- Learning Spanish Like Crazy
- Patrick had heard that was a good companion to learning with Rosetta Stone and intends to purchase this soon.
Well, I think Rosetta Stone is only good for vocab building along with SRS. As said, it doesn’t cover much grammar so just spending some extra time with your SRS sentences is much more effective (and cheaper!).
Ramses | May 20, 2008 | Reply
@Ramses: I’ve personally only played with Rosetta Stone for a few minutes, but I would agree that any study method supplemented with SRS is beneficial. I hope to introduce Patrick to SRS soon.
peter | May 20, 2008 | Reply
Forgot to mention something. Ive found some online flash cards for verbs and they work really well. I dont have the link because i was on my laptop at the time. And as it is, I am too lazy to go and get it. Google spanish flash cards and you can find it. The flashcard program lets you pick which ones to keep in your pile. So that way you can get rid of ones that you know you wont forget. There was like 82 or so verbs in different tenses so it was helpful.
Patrick | May 20, 2008 | Reply
I’ve never used Rosetta Stone before - it looks too expensive to buy. How does it work exactly?
thomas | May 21, 2008 | Reply
@thomas: I’ve not used the program for very long, but the part of it I did try consisted of showing you four pictures, and a word or phrase was spoken and displayed on the screen, and you had to choose the picture that matched the phrase. It starts simple with things like “boy”, “girl”, etc. and builds up slowly to things like “a boy under an airplane” and “a girl riding a horse”. I’m sure it gets more complicated than that, but like I said, I haven’t used it much.
peter | May 21, 2008 | Reply
I can personally attest to how well Livemocha.com works (at least for me). It is a great language-learning social networking site that allows you to enroll in language “courses.” There are many courses for Spanish, which I am working on now, as well as Brazilian Portuguese, which I have just begun.
I also feel that flash cards are very helpful tools, as opposed to just reading words in a dictionary. However, I feel that it is counterproductive to use paper flash cards, so I am thinking of making the transition to online flash cards. Any recommendations for which program to use?
Jeff | May 29, 2008 | Reply
@Jeff: I personally use Mnemosyne (http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/), but it does not have an online component. Lots of people use Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) which has an online component, but I’ve never used it.
peter | Jun 3, 2008 | Reply
@peter and Jeff: I’ve used both Mnemosyne and Anki and Anki is by far the superior program. You can customize your cards however you want, format text any way you want, and it gives you a bunch of different graphs and statistics to look at so you can see how you are doing and what’s coming up.
thomas | Jun 3, 2008 | Reply