Jun 02 2008
Silent Spanish?
While working on our latest project, Spanish Quiz, I reaffirmed my belief that audio is essential to learning Spanish, or any language for that matter. At some point you have to speak and learn to listen, unless you’re just interested in reading foreign literature in its native language, and so it’s necessary to develop a pronunciation that suites your goals and reasons for learning Spanish in the first place.
To develop good speaking skills in another language, you must listen to that language being spoken natively. And with the ease of producing and distributing audio on the web, there’s little reason a Spanish learning site should be without audio, otherwise one could save themselves a lot of time and just buy a $10.00 book.
So then the question becomes, what accent do you want to emulate and why? For example, are you traveling to Spain or Mexico? If you need to communicate in Spanish on the job, where are your co-workers, or business associates from? Once you have your learning goals and reasons, you can now search out appropriate online and off-line material to support your efforts.
