Hey friends! Happy Thanksgiving! I am super excited to spend some time with my east coast family and eat a Thanksgiving feast!

For a little over a week, I have been working on doing something that’s both creative and practical: learn spanish!

I took a total of four years of spanish between high school and college, which was pretty relevant as I went to school in California and travelled to Mexico for my honeymoon. I miss having all the different cultures in SoCal around me, and I thought that trying to resurrect my spanish speaking skills would be a good way to still experience some of that. And speaking another language is a great skill to have in general! How have I been doing this you ask? I have found some great online tools!

DuoLinguo

This app was the first one I downloaded because it had fairly high reviews, and it has been great! I set my goal to practice spanish 15 minutes a day (which is considered to be the “serious” level). After assessing my current level of fluency, I tested out of the beginning segments and was able to jump into some harder categories.

Things I love about this app:

• You are tested in multiple ways, from speaking the language, to translating, to typing, to matching spanish and english words
• It’s one of the most user-friendly apps ever
• There are chat bots in the app so you can simulate an actual conversation! My first chat was with a viking whose pet bear ate our fish dinner. It was quite the ordeal.
• You can go online to see all the words you have learned so far and how well you remember them

The only downside is that there are only so many segments you can do until you time out and have to wait until the next day. So in the meantime, I found…

Coffee Break Spanish podcast

I found this podcast and have listened to about 7 episodes. The episodes are about 25-40 minutes long and it’s perfect to listen to when it’s a little slow at work.

Things I love about this podcast:

• The format is of a teacher and a spanish student, so you learn spanish basics along with a newbie. There is a lot of repetition, which helps it stick!
• Mark and Cara are both Scottish, so it’s really fun to listen to their accents
• It’s short and broken up into segments that make sense

This is a great resource if you want to listen to how the words should actually be pronounced.

StudySpanish.com

This website has been extremely helpful because it goes a little more in depth! I started off in the grammar section as that is the most difficult part for me. I’m on unit 3 already and while the first part was fairly easy, it is becoming more and more challenging!

Things I love about this website:

• It’s broken up into units with a thorough explanation section
• They have suggestions for flashcards with each section
• There are tons of tests and quizzes to test your knowledge

This site does a great job at explaining the nuances of spanish and letting you know that just like English, there are always exceptions to the rules. For a free resource, it has lots of really good information!

Tinycards

DuoLinguo created this app to go along with theirs, but this one is just flashcards.

Things I love about this app:

• Categories are broken up like the DuoLingo app
• Each card has a picture as well as a recording of how the word is pronounced to help you remember it
• You can swipe through all the cards and then be quizzed on the words

I have really enjoyed relearning spanish and I hope that it will come in handy! Although I think I understand it pretty well, I still need to work on speaking it and forming sentences. Those verb endings are hard to memorize! If you’re interested in learning spanish, I would definitely check out these resources to start.

Make sure to check back here in a few weeks for Friday Favorites: Holiday Edition!