Vocaroo Voice Recording

Testing Vocaroo Voice Recording

espanol!

yo estoy estudiando espanol de latin america. yo estoy estudiando tiempo presente.

spanish immersion (latin america) - because i'm so new to spanish, even though i live in los angeles, i like the simplicity of spanish immersion - at least disc 1. the disc's menu has a graphical menu of a disc with various themes and subjects populating the disc in a circle. pick one and the software has a "practice" section, recording and feedback section, an easy quiz and hard quiz section. each section has words and pictures and two people, man and woman, at the bottom of the screen who translate words and phrases for you or tell you if you're correct in a quiz. words and phrases are accompanied by pictures and audio from the man and woman or your own recording. the recording function, however, only gives you 3 seconds or so to record and repeat. this part really needs tweaking in terms of giving you more time.

so far, however, i'm learning my numbers, body parts, basic foods, time, common phrases and more!

also, i hired spanish tutor. :-)

instant immersion spanish

hola muchachas y muchachos,
yo estoy intentando el programa de instant immersion espanol.

rosetta stone - strictly spanish language

instant immersion - very basic with pictures for menus, textbox with vocab and phrases (so far) in text.

hoy

hola amigos,
hoy, yo aprendo pronombres demonstrativos y adjectivos demonstrativos.

okay, i'm still in the first unit of rosetta stone but i'm at the section where you type in the items in each lesson.

also, getting a spanish tutor ($25/hr). there are spanish tutors in craigslist for $15 and $20 an hour. the one i picked is not an L1 spanish speaker but majored in spanish so she can give more explanations. we'll see how that goes!

smart phones

one other thing, i will probably purchase a smartphone and use a few of the apps out there in place of the little notebooks i'm keeping. for vocabulary, there are plenty of flashcard apps. looking forward to using them...

pronouns, conjugations, new software purchase

from e-learn spanish language website, i learned that you should learn pronouns first before verb conjugations because the pronoun forms (and nouns) determine how to conjugate verbs.

i purchased at costco (yes!) Instant Immersion. i researched this program before. on amazon, this program has nearly a 4-star rating with 133 reviews. not as robust or functional as rosetta stone, this program apparently is adequate for beginners. in addition, it was only about $29 with tax at costco. it's latin american spanish and mac and pc friendly.

keeping up with Spanish

something i found out that was quite interesting is that a ton of the major Spanish learning software programs teach Castillian Spanish; that is, Spain or European Spanish. the is that Castillian Spanish is considered formal, educated Spanish. odd huh? well, i guess "culture" (narrowly defined here) started in Europe!

so, i started making lists of nouns, verbs, pronouns, prepositions and common phrases. i got them all from rosetta stone (v2) and the website, www.elearnspanishlanguage.com. i really like the website. it's organized, simple and mainly text-driven with some audio wave files for pronunciation. this is in comparison to rosetta stone, which has both audio, text, input boxes to practice writing and pictures.

the first couple of weeks, i really just "listened" to Spanish on the radio and watched some Spanish TV programming to get a feel for the language. i'm now officially taking notes and practicing. as all the SLA theories say, it just takes time to learn a new language. i can't wait until i actually understand the Spanish radio and TV stations!