Best resource to learn Spanish

[VerbalTruist]

I have almost finished duolingo (the android app) but am still in the very basics of learning Spanish. Does anybody know a decent online course or resource (textbooks etc) about learning Spanish a fast and solid way?

Have you tried making a Spanish speaking friend on or offline who is willing to talk to you?

 

[December Flower]

best way to learn any language is surrounding yourself with the language
watching stuff you know well in that language is pretty amazing,
or try Spanish cartoons with subtitles. listen to spanish music

I speak 5 languages well enough to have complex conversations,
and I never used one of these pages. I just travelled and watched cartoons
You need to absolutely surround yourself with the language

Once you understand the structure of the language's Grammar, it's just fine-tuning and vocabulary

 

[plumbus-nine]

I'm though 3 of 5 Rosetta Stone courses (skipped the first) and almost finished with Duolingo but somehow I am hitting a wall. I don't seem to relevantly progress in the lastest time. My private life is a bit difficult which will further distract but I think either I give up or I get some amphetamine prescribed to continue Would love to go to a real life Spanish course but so far I only found English classes around here. Maybe contract a private teacher, labor isn't expensive here but I wonder what advance a teacher gives me about these programs and books. I need to get out to meet real people, not more time in front of a screen.

Not everybody is as gifted as December Flower. In other times learning was easy, almost free for me but a breakup followed by a 4 year drug binge reinforced my ADHD. I'm nervous all the time while sober and have difficulties remembering stuff.

 

[Jabberwocky]

I'm though 3 of 5 Rosetta Stone courses (skipped the first) and almost finished with Duolingo but somehow I am hitting a wall. I don't seem to relevantly progress in the lastest time. My private life is a bit difficult which will further distract but I think either I give up or I get some amphetamine prescribed to continue Would love to go to a real life Spanish course but so far I only found English classes around here. Maybe contract a private teacher, labor isn't expensive here but I wonder what advance a teacher gives me about these programs and books. I need to get out to meet real people, not more time in front of a screen.

Not everybody is as gifted as December Flower. In other times learning was easy, almost free for me but a breakup followed by a 4 year drug binge reinforced my ADHD. I'm nervous all the time while sober and have difficulties remembering stuff.

How is Rosetta Stone? I know it's always been the go-to for many years, but I'm guessing it's far more advanced than Duo Lingo?

I need to learn Norwegian. When I lived there I picked up a lot just from... well living there, but everyone speaks English perfectly so there's no need to actually learn it, so I never ended up taking lessons. But I still want to learn it, especially as I still have clients in Norway for which I have to pay a translator to work with me. Would be nice not to have that expense

 

[Jerry Atrick]

I'm though 3 of 5 Rosetta Stone courses (skipped the first) and almost finished with Duolingo but somehow I am hitting a wall. I don't seem to relevantly progress in the lastest time. My private life is a bit difficult which will further distract but I think either I give up or I get some amphetamine prescribed to continue Would love to go to a real life Spanish course but so far I only found English classes around here. Maybe contract a private teacher, labor isn't expensive here but I wonder what advance a teacher gives me about these programs and books. I need to get out to meet real people, not more time in front of a screen.

Not everybody is as gifted as December Flower. In other times learning was easy, almost free for me but a breakup followed by a 4 year drug binge reinforced my ADHD. I'm nervous all the time while sober and have difficulties remembering stuff.

Did you say you're in DF? I think there are some language schools there as my university sent some study abroad students there when I was in undergrad. The language school I attended was in Cuernavaca, which is about 50 miles south of DF. It was called El Centro Bilingue and was top notch. They test you upon entry for placement, have tons of courses at every level, and include conversation courses where all you do is talk to the instructor and each other. IMO full immersion is the best and fastest way to learn.

EDIT: So I checked and El Centro Bilingue is now called Universidad Internacional- Center for Linguistic and Multicultural Studies.

Learn Spanish In Cuernavaca Mexico at UNINTER

Learn Spanish language in Mexico Cuernavaca at UNINTER with intensive private classes and courses for executives and professional purposes. Best Spanish school

spanishschool.uninter.edu.mx

 

[December Flower]

Not everybody is as gifted as December Flower. In other times learning was easy, almost free for me but a breakup followed by a 4 year drug binge reinforced my ADHD. I'm nervous all the time while sober and have difficulties remembering stuff.

Oh I'm far from gifted, however thanks for thinking so.
I refuse to believe languages are hard to learn for anyone. Or learning anything for that matter
Learning always has something to do with wanting to learn.
If you don't want to learn, you're not going to, it's as easy as that.
Your consciousness and sub-consciousness are in contact all the time.
If you sit down with a book and think to yourself "this sucks. i don't want to learn now, i'd much rather pleasure myself sexually", then you're not going to learn a thing, because your brain thinks you don't want to learn this. You need to properly communicate with your brain.

It's best if you get excited from learning. I don't know how it is for NTs, but me as an Aspie I get super excited from information, literally floods of dopamine. New info can feel better than sex, and that's exactly the state you need to be in to retain information for as long as possible. If that's impossible for you, you need to at least be in a state where you can get excited about learning new things.

You need to be determined to learn the language, determined to learn grammar lessons for hours on end, determined to really dive into the language and surround yourself with it. You're not going to learn shit if you do it for an hour once a week, you could just as well feed imaginary ducks. If all you want to do is be able to say "hello" "how are you" "good bye" and so on, you might make enough progress once a week, but not if you want to learn the language well enough to have conversations in it.

I mean i've done this shit over and over, I know what I'm talking about. I was terrible at languages back in school(except English - English I was bad til grade 7, had English classes since grade 2), because French and Latin just didn't interest me much. Still hate Latin. Fuck you, Romans, with your unnecessarily complicated sentence structure. I first really learned French in France, and that will never go away, it's just lodged in my brain. Same for Spanish and Spain, learned all I know over there. We often didn't even allow each other to speak German, because that would just result in laziness(xept for the period where we missed home so much that we started speaking Bavarian, even though we usually talked in High German) we spoke the language of the country we were in, even to each other, and it helped so so much. You can't have "the easy way out" with languages, or you'll never learn anything. The people in Spain even offered speaking English, over and over, but aside from their English being terrible we just wanted to learn Spanish. You need people who respect that, because once you start speaking English or your native tongue, you're going to opt for that in the future as well

and yeah, as long as you don't try learning German, you will be very successful with that technique. Just surround yourself with the language. If you can't travel there, watch cartoons in the language with subtitles. First subtitles in your language, then subtitles in the language they're speaking. That's how I learned English, and it worked like a charm. I was a D to E student in English til 7th grade, then I started watching the Simpsons and South Park in English, was recommended to me, and by grade 8 i was a straight A student and never had another grade than an A again.

 

[Jerry Atrick]

Did you say you're in DF? I think there are some language schools there as my university sent some study abroad students there when I was in undergrad. The language school I attended was in Cuernavaca, which is about 50 miles south of DF. It was called El Centro Bilingue and was top notch. They test you upon entry for placement, have tons of courses at every level, and include conversation courses where all you do is talk to the instructor and each other. IMO full immersion is the best and fastest way to learn.

EDIT: So I checked and El Centro Bilingue is now called Universidad Internacional- Center for Linguistic and Multicultural Studies.

Learn Spanish In Cuernavaca Mexico at UNINTER

Learn Spanish language in Mexico Cuernavaca at UNINTER with intensive private classes and courses for executives and professional purposes. Best Spanish school

spanishschool.uninter.edu.mx

Oh I'm far from gifted, however thanks for thinking so.
I refuse to believe languages are hard to learn for anyone. Or learning anything for that matter
Learning always has something to do with wanting to learn.
If you don't want to learn, you're not going to, it's as easy as that.
Your consciousness and sub-consciousness are in contact all the time.
If you sit down with a book and think to yourself "this sucks. i don't want to learn now, i'd much rather pleasure myself sexually", then you're not going to learn a thing, because your brain thinks you don't want to learn this. You need to properly communicate with your brain.

It's best if you get excited from learning. I don't know how it is for NTs, but me as an Aspie I get super excited from information, literally floods of dopamine. New info can feel better than sex, and that's exactly the state you need to be in to retain information for as long as possible. If that's impossible for you, you need to at least be in a state where you can get excited about learning new things.

You need to be determined to learn the language, determined to learn grammar lessons for hours on end, determined to really dive into the language and surround yourself with it. You're not going to learn shit if you do it for an hour once a week, you could just as well feed imaginary ducks. If all you want to do is be able to say "hello" "how are you" "good bye" and so on, you might make enough progress once a week, but not if you want to learn the language well enough to have conversations in it.

I mean i've done this shit over and over, I know what I'm talking about. I was terrible at languages back in school(except English - English I was bad til grade 7, had English classes since grade 2), because French and Latin just didn't interest me much. Still hate Latin. Fuck you, Romans, with your unnecessarily complicated sentence structure. I first really learned French in France, and that will never go away, it's just lodged in my brain. Same for Spanish and Spain, learned all I know over there. We often didn't even allow each other to speak German, because that would just result in laziness(xept for the period where we missed home so much that we started speaking Bavarian, even though we usually talked in High German) we spoke the language of the country we were in, even to each other, and it helped so so much. You can't have "the easy way out" with languages, or you'll never learn anything. The people in Spain even offered speaking English, over and over, but aside from their English being terrible we just wanted to learn Spanish. You need people who respect that, because once you start speaking English or your native tongue, you're going to opt for that in the future as well

and yeah, as long as you don't try learning German, you will be very successful with that technique. Just surround yourself with the language. If you can't travel there, watch cartoons in the language with subtitles. First subtitles in your language, then subtitles in the language they're speaking. That's how I learned English, and it worked like a charm. I was a D to E student in English til 7th grade, then I started watching the Simpsons and South Park in English, was recommended to me, and by grade 8 i was a straight A student and never had another grade than an A again.

@plumbus-nine I will echo what December Flower said about being in the native country and not using English as a crutch.

When I studied abroad in Cuernavaca, I stayed with a host family with a couple of other students from my university. We were encouraged to only speak Spanish at our homes and to speak Spanish everywhere we went even outside of the language school. Our host family knew English but refused to speak it with us. The other guys I lived with cheated but I tried my hardest to not speak any English even when I was at home. Watched movies and TV in Spanish like December Flower said. This is all what I meant when I said "total immersion."

 

[Jabberwocky]

@plumbus-nine I will echo what December Flower said about being in the native country and not using English as a crutch.

When I studied abroad in Cuernavaca, I stayed with a host family with a couple of other students from my university. We were encouraged to only speak Spanish at our homes and to speak Spanish everywhere we went even outside of the language school. Our host family knew English but refused to speak it with us. The other guys I lived with cheated but I tried my hardest to not speak any English even when I was at home. Watched movies and TV in Spanish like December Flower said. This is all what I meant when I said "total immersion."

I must admit this is exactly what I did when living abroad in one place. I did pick up a fair bit but always spoke English unless I was drunk. Now I'm in a new country every 6 months and work from my laptop so it's pretty hard and my brain gets really scrambled sometimes as I'll learn the basics 'thank you 'hello' 'bye' etc but when moving around so much I end up saying the wrong language in the wrong place.

My girlfriend is American though so I'm learning American. Y'all.