So, I'm working on learning Spanish, and there are a few things that I have found really helpful.
I'm using Rosetta Stone software, and it's really great when I put in the time to do it, but at times hard to motivate myself to do it (since, you know, once I get on the computer, there's all of the Internet to read before I buckle down to work...). I just finished a continuing ed class and am hoping to start another one soon.
The instructor from the class I just finished gave us lots of helpful web resources. I really like BBC Mundo, which has short articles -- their photos of the day are particularly helpful, since the captions aren't too long and the photos give lots of context. I also like their "News in 60 seconds" but have to listen to it a couple times before I get the bulk of it. He also suggested spaleon.com, tomisimo.org, and wordreference.com (which has other languages, too!). I've also heard that Destinos is really cool.
And finally, the inspiration for this blog post is www.spanish-word-a-day.com, a neat service that will send a new Spanish vocabulary word to your email inbox, complete with pronunciation guide and example sentence. And now they've added a weekly review sheet -- it's a nice way to slowly add vocab, and it's been really encouraging to go from never having any idea what the words (or most of the words in the example sentences) were to actually knowing some of them already! :)
