Business Spanish

Learning Spanish for business can have big advantages for you if you are dealing with Spanish speaking countries, such as Mexico, Argentina or the Spanish Caribbean.Even if you learn enough to great people you'll oil the wheels of commerce; and if you can negotiate in Spanish then you give yourself and your company a big advantage.

Read more: Spanish language downloads for business.

Spanish downloads

Yesterday I was talking a bit about how downloadable Spanish courses are beginning to make an impression on the market. In fact I think it's inevitable that the end of the CD audio course is nigh, with downloads being much more cost effective and easier to distribute while having all the advantages of CD too.

Read more: Spanish downloads

Learn Spanish - downloads

Spanish audio courses have been available for years, most recently on CD, before that on cassette tape and prior to that I imagine they were available on vinyl disks. The latest trend is towards MP3 and downloadable courses the big advantage of course that you can upload the course to your iPods and listen whenever you like.

Find out more: Learn Spanish downloads

Why read and write in Spanish?

While you may think you'll never be fluent in Spanish, maybe you don't even need to go that far. Deal with companies in Spanish speaking countries for work? Maybe you just need to read and write emails in Spanish to be able to get a big benefit.

Read more: Learn Spanish audio CD courses

Spanish language CD

Learning Spanish at how from an audio CD isn't ideal, but if it's the only choice that suits your lifestyle then it'll have to do. Be warned; you'll need to be very disciplined to practice every day. And you'll need to be hard on yourself when you seem to have stopped making any progress.

read more: Spanish language CD

Learn Spanish fast, learn Spanish slow

Want to learn Spanish fast? Why not go for an immersion course in a Spanish speaking country. OK, not all of us can afford the time or it doesn't fit into our life. But I'll tell you one thing; no matter what, you can find a course that will suit you. It may take longer but you can do it.

More about learning Spanish.

Learn to speak Spanish

The internet has brought a revolution in our ability to access information. One of the big topics of the last few years has been music and movie piracy, but the same technology that has allowed this to happen has legitimate uses too. Several Spanish courses now exist utilizing the this mass distribution to delivery content almost instantly and at lower cost than courses supplied on CD or tape.

Learn to speak Spanish online at Simply Learn Spanish.

Turin Accommodation

Turin city centre is a great location to stay, with a good selection of small and picturesque hotels. It turns out some of them are in former palaces; at least one was formerly used as a brothel!

While hotels are often the obvious choice for anyone visiting Turin, it pays to bear in mind that they are not the only option. For budget travellers there are hostels; and for longer stay visitors there are apartments available too.

See more information about Turin accommodation.

Learn how to speak Spanish

If you want to learn how to speak Spanish you can do it in one of 2 ways; the easy way; or the hard way.
The easy way is to go and live in a Spanish speaking country and speak nothing but Spanish, make a fool of yourself and learn, learn, learn. That's the best way. The hard way is everything else.
However, you really can learn to speak Spanish if you put your mind to it. Choose a method that fits in with your lifestyle and just get down and do it.
There, it wasn't really so hard was it?

Learn to speak Spanish

There are a multitude of ways in which you can learn Spanish and no one of them is right for everyone. While the absolutely best way is to go and live in Spain or a latin American country, it's difficult for most people to arrange that. So what of the other options?
See my website for more info on how to learn to speak Spanish.

Turin Airport

Turin Airport is officially called Torino Caselle and was built for the 2006 Winter Olympics. It has all the usual modern facilities including food and snacks as well as bookshops and music. On arrival car rental facilities are available and you can also access facilities such as a VIP lounge, toddlers play area and banking facilities. You can get to Turin city centre by bus, taxi or train.

Find out more about Turin Airport.

Tickets for FC Barcelona

The draw has been made and tickets will soon be available for the greatest of European football teams, FC Barcelona. With their great new lineup as well as old faces like Ronaldinho and Messi it promises to be an exciting year. Find out more about buying FC Barcelona tickets online and save yourself the disappointment of missing a match.

Spanish Immersion

Absolutely the best way to learn to speak Spanish by living in a Spanish speaking country for a few months. There are schemes that allow you to do that, where you spend your days in class while staying with a local host family. The advantage of this is that you are constantly surrounded by the language and the culture - it's almost impossible to escape it in fact.

Aiming to speak Spanish

The reason that many people study Spanish is to acquire a good level of conversational Spanish. Since that's the case it's a pity that so many courses concentrate on grammar, grammar and grammar above anything else. While grammar does have it's part in learning Spanish it is not the most important thing by far - practicing talking is.

Spanish lessons and FC Barcelona

Yesterday I was talking about how learning Spanish is good when you travel. While all that was going on (me writing I mean) the Spanish La Liga was being drawn and so today we know when and against who they'll be playing, although not the Barcelona FC ticket prices yet.

Anyway, the two things merged into a stroke of genius - why not visit Barcelona and study Spanish on an intensive course. And while you're here, go and watch FC Barcelona play?

The advantage of a second language on your travels

Do you love traveling as much as me? Well, once you realize that so much of the world either speaks no English, or the quality they speak is so bad you can't understand it anyway you should think of learning another language.

As the third most common language in the world and a neighboring language to the United States, Spanish is the obvious choice. OK, it's no good if you're visiting Rome for instance, but much of the Caribbean, Mexico and South America speaks Spanish.

Flights to Turin

These days you can flights to Turin from cities all over Europe. The budget airlines fly there too, making Turin more accessible than ever. Also, you may like to travel by a combination of flight and train - both Bergamo and Milan are serviced by low budget airlines and you can travel from Milan central station to Train by train. Read my article for more info about flights to Turin.

Why speak Spanish?

I could give you a dozen reasons about why I think you should speak Spanish, but if none of them really clicks with you then what's the point. My first attempt at learning was because I was visiting Spain a lot and wanted to speak with the locals, but what really got me interested was when I started dating a Spanish girl. I've looked at the reasons to speak Spanish in an article on my website.

Listening to Spanish

Listening to someone speaking Spanish is a 2 part skill, broken down into decoding the sounds into words and then decoding the words into meanings. You can focus on each part, trying to hear the sounds better without attempting to understand, which come from having a larger number of phrases stored in your memory from which to synthesize new phrases.

read more about how to learn Spanish from my website.

Getting out of a rut

If you find you're stuck with your language course and making no progress then it's time to pause and find out why.

All you need to do is identify what us holding you back - usually it'll be just one area that is doing so - and formulate a learning strategy to get you past it.

Basically your problem will fall into one of 4 areas - listening, understanding, formulating or performing - and so you need to find out which area is the problem and decide what you need to do to effectively learn.

Find out more about learning Spanish from my website.

Spanish for beginners - the basics

Everyone has to start somewhere and when you learn Spanish you start with the basics. Take a look at the phrases below for some real rudimentary Spanish that will prove an excellent foundation for what you study afterwards.

Hello	Hola
Goodbye	Adiós
Yes	Sí
No	No
Thanks	Gracias
Many thanks	Muchas Gracias
You're welcome	De nada
Please	Por favor
Good morning	Buenos días
Good afternoon	Buenas tardes
Good evening	Buenas noches
Goodnight	Buenas noches
How are you?	¿Como estás?
Very well	Muy bien

See my website for more details on Spanish for beginners.

A morning at the beach

The sun is shining and the sky is blue. It must be summer, so being a Friday I spent a couple of hours on the beach (la playa). The sea (el mar) was slightly rough due to a slight breeze and so sand (la arena) got blown everywhere, but I did swim before falling asleep under the warn sun (el sol). After getting back home I had lunch and had a nap (siesta) and so now its time to work.


Want to learn Spanish? See my website for details.

Spanish fluency - an excercise to improve

If you have Puerto del Sol audio magazine or something similar I have a great little exercise to help you improve your Spanish fluency, understanding of spoken Spanish, pronunciation and vocabulary all in one. Here's what to do;

1. Listen to the audio all the way through. Try and understand as much as possible. Don't stop and don't peek at the text! Note down what you DO understand.

2. Listen to the audio again, this time pausing when necessary.

3. Take the text and read it while listening to the audio. Mimic the speaker as best you can and keep up no matter what.

FC Barcelona matches in August

Although they stay away from the August heat in Barcelona, FC Barcelona return at the end of August to play host to Inter Milan in the Gamper Trophy.

Although it is a competition in name the reality is that the match is actually a friendly match played against an invited team - always one of the top teams in Europe.

After a summer tour to the far east and a match against Bayern Munich in Germany, this will be the first opportunity to see the newly strengthened squad play at home. Miss it at your peril.

See FC Barcelona Tickets for more info.

More on reading Spanish

Yesterday I wrote how you can choose to increase your Spanish vocabulary, or use your reading to develop coping mechanisms that help you understand when you are missing information or your brain just isn't up to speed :-)

After that I decided to add a new page about reading Spanish to the website as I think it's great info that can help you improve your language skills.

Let me know what you think.

Reading Spanish

One thing to bear in mind when you read Spanish is your learning aim. Are you trying to increase your vocabulary or are you trying to improve your ability to understand Spanish?

At first sight they may appear to be similar; in fact they are two very different skills.

If you stop each time you can't understand a word and look it up in the dictionary then your Spanish vocabulary is sure to improve, bit by bit.

But if you just carry on reading you are training yourself to fill in the knowledge gaps by looking at the bigger picture, just like happens when someone speaks rapid Spanish to you.

You can read more about learning Spanish from my website.

Study Spanish

Study Spanish - yeah right, but how?

There are dozens of courses, different methods, and immersion courses in Spanish speaking countries - which is best for YOU?

OK, good question; can you sepnd 3 months in a Spanish speaking country? No, because you can't afford the time, can't move your family, or some other reason.

No problem, that option isn't going to work for you.

So, choose something that will. Learn more about how to study Spanish.