Learn Spanish - Introductions

Moving on to the Rocket Spanish Mini Course Part 4, this part of the course returns to look at some written Spanish.

It's all about Spanish introductions and greetings - essential material if your visiting a Spanish speaking country even for a short time.

Here we learn expressions such as:

Encantado (Like the old English expression Enchanted)

EI gusto es mío (The pleasure is mine - again like the old English expression)

¿Cómo te llamas? (What's your name - literally, how do you call yourself)

Me llamo Antonio (I'm called Antonio)

¿De dónde eres? (Where do you come from? - literally, From where are you?)

Also introduced at this point is the concept of masculine and feminine words in the Spanish language. In general, masculine words end in an "o", and feminine in an "a". Apparently the same applies to the adjectives which must agree with the nouns to which they relate. So Spanish is much like most European languages in this way.

However, they leave it at that for the time being so as not to complicate matters.

One interesting little point I've learnt here is that, if you don't understand something somebody says while talking to you, it's more natural to say No entiendo, rather than the expression which first comes to mind and everyone knows, No comprendo !!! It's the difference between "I don't understand" and "I don't comprehend" - obvious really!

Well, that's it - another useful little lesson in the basics of learning Spanish. Take a look yourself. It's free to sign up for this mini Spanish course. Here's the web address again: Rocket SpanishUntil next time.

Let's go learn Spanish !

Learn Spanish - Speaking

Moving on to the Rocket Spanish Mini Course Part 3 -

Greetings again, but this time a full 25 minutes of audio going into depth on how to greet people in Spanish, how to respond to greetings, and how to explain either that you either don't speak Spanish, you do speak Spanish, or you speak only a little Spanish.

A lot of repetition, but it drives the necessary vocabulary home. This is actually quite necessary. I don't know about you, but whenever I've been trying out a new language in another country - and this certainly happened to me when I first moved to France - one of the biggest problems is always getting the brain to work quick enough and co-ordinate with the mout to be able to respond to someone sufficiently quickly and intelligibly - even with the simplest of phrases. That's because it's still not coming out naturally.

And it needs to be (almost) instinctively, without thinking. So I think that this is the right approach to learning Spanish - get those basic, fundamental, essential phrases firmly engrained in the brain so that they appear at the right times without having to think to hard and seeming to be lost for words.

So here we go again:-

¿Cómo te llamas? (what's your name?)

¿De dónde eres? (where do you come from?)

Soy de los Estados Unidos (I'm from the United States)

Repetitive - yes. But not boring. These guys seem to be able to put it all together - even the simplest stuff in an interesting and practical way. Take a look yourself. It's free to sign up for this mini Spanish course. Here's the web address again: Rocket Spanish

Until next time. Let's go learn Spanish !