If you can’t exactly fly off to a Spanish-speaking locale, or sit yourself through an entire semester’s worth of language classes, then your best bet to acquiring a new tongue is to learn to speak Spanish online. Online study offers many advantages to the eager student: you can go at your own pace, you can take lessons anytime and anywhere, and you don’t even have to get out of the house to do so.
There are different platforms that can help you learn how to speak Spanish. Some are free, while others require a paid subscription. However, there is no need to go about this blindly, because a lot of their paid programs will give you a trial run or a free version first, just so that you can see whether or not it works for you.
There are three main categories of language study materials that are available online:
Lesson videos – thanks to YouTube, you can access thousands and thousands of Spanish lessons anytime. There are various Spanish-speaking gurus on YouTube who regularly post new content to their channels. The beauty of video is that it closely mimics the classroom set-up, where an instructor explains concepts and talks directly to you. The downside is that YouTube videos tend to be incomplete and short, but the fact that most gurus post in series can give some sort of continuity to the lessons.
Audio lessons – for the student on the go, audio lessons can be downloaded and saved to a mobile player or a smartphone so that you can keep listening whenever you have to be on the go. You can also buy instructional CDs, which are great for those who spend a large amount of time commuting. An added bonus is that traffic jams are much less boring when you are making productive use your time when stuck in it.
Interactive Spanish courses – Interactive multimedia software is possibly one of the best things that ever happened to adult education. The streamlined quality of interactive language curriculum gives you all the fundamentals and more. Choose from a wide range of interactive learning programs online, and allocate at least an hour every day to studying. The high effectiveness rates of these programs (provided you do the hard work, of course) make them suitable for those who need to learn in a short amount of time. The responsive features of popular Spanish online programs (such as voice recognition, audio playback) make it easier than ever to track your progress and gauge where there still is room for improvement.
