Foreign Perspectives

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

If you’re considering learning a little Spanish then you’re in luck because it’s one of the easier languages for English speakers to pick up both in terms of the vocabulary and the pronunciation.

Although the appearance of elanguageschool looks like it would only have the most basic grammar in fact the site actually skims over almost all of the core Spanish grammar and, if you collected it together it would give you a reasonable summary of how the language works.

Very much an advertising driven site but useful content if you can see past that.

Popularity: 8% [?]

If you’re learning Spanish one of the worries that you’ll have is with the wide variety of accents that you’ll come across whilst you’re learning the language. Yet, native speakers can cope with them all so you should aim to do so as well.Fortunately you’ve an equally large range of Spanish schools around the world. For example, Spanish immersion Costa Rica offers a range of courses starting from one week up to six months which will naturally give you a chance to hear the Costa Rican accent.Won’t it be impossible to follow? Well, as it happens I ended up having a south American teacher for the intensive course that I did last year and settled into his accent in under a day so you don’t need to worry about it.

The other big plus point is that you get to pick up some of the local culture too. That’s an important part of learning any language and Spanish is very much an amalgam of cultures from everywhere.

Popularity: 8% [?]

The Open University tutorials are always on Saturdays so you sort-of get into the way of assuming that all their activities are on Saturdays. Well, they usually are but the exams aren’t and it certainly throws me for one.

This year was particularly confusing in that the exam was in Dublin for the first time rather than in Belfast so the local Dublin hotels did rather well out of that. How come we didn’t get paid £70 each because the exam was in Dublin though? After all, they’d have charged us £70 each if it was us that asked for it to be in Dublin (ie abroad).

Hmmm, wonder if they’d pay up if we all asked?

Popularity: 8% [?]