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This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Listening and understanding Spanish is a big weakness for me. I can read Spanish much better than I can listen to it. So, to get better at it I’ve been spending more time listening to Spanish music and podcasts. Since I last wrote about finding music you like in your language of study , I have discovered Pandora . Pandora is great because you start with an artist or multiple artists you like, and it starts playing similar artists. As you listen, you can give thumbs up or down to each song, and Pandora will adjust what it plays next based on your choices, essentially learning what you will probably like to hear. Another great thing about Pandora is that it will often play artists in your target language that are difficult to find in your home country, even stuff that I’ve found difficult to find on Amazon.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I’m sure the question on your mind right now is: So, who won the free copy of 601 Spanish Verbs? Was it me?

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Update: The deadline for entering the drawing has been extended, see details at the bottom of this post.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I’ve just released an update to Barra de Español, version 1.1. The new version has some new features that I believe make it a necessary upgrade for those of you currently using version 1.0. You can get the new version from https://addons.mozilla.org/.

Just a quick update to announce that Barra de Español version 1.1 has been released. For more details, see my post on babelhut.com about the release.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Ladies and gentlemen, Spanish students across the globe, I’d like to introduce you to my latest creation! It’s a Firefox add-on called Barra de Español. It lets you find word translations and definitions using wordreference.com by typing the word in the toolbar, or by highlighting the word and right-clicking on it. It helps insert the special characters that Spanish uses that may not be on your keyboard.  It provides links to native Spanish web sites which can help you in your study of the language, including news, reference, and video sites. But the best part is that it’s free!

I have just released a new Firefox add-on called Barra de Español, a toolbar for those who are studying the Spanish language. It makes it easier to find definitions for words in Spanish or English, it helps you insert special characters that are specific to Spanish into any textbox in Firefox, and it provides links to native Spanish websites useful for learning the language. You may install it from addons.mozilla.org.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Joining Twitter has become the trendy thing for bloggers to do, and while the non-conformist inside of me tells me to go against the trend, I think there may be some value in Twitter that I haven’t totally realized yet. With that in mind, Thomas and I have both signed up for Twitter experimentally, and we hope that our readers will follow us there!

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

I had once assumed that if I were to learn a constructed language, it would be Esperanto. It seems to be the most popular conlang out there, with several studies done on its effectiveness on improving language-aquisition skills. But last week my brother reminded me what assuming does and convinced me to start learning Lojban with him. Lojban is described as a logical language with unambiguous grammar, so it should be easier to learn than a natural language.

This post was originally posted on Babelhut.

Last night I found Spanish-dubbed versions of a couple of American television shows online, and I was watching them while doing laundry. I was doing this until about 1am, when I crashed and fell asleep. I don’t remember much about what I dreamt, except that everyone in the dream, including me, was speaking Spanish. Sort of. Some of it was Spanish. Some of it was gibberish that my mind made up and pretended to be Spanish. I think this was because I still am not good at comprehending spoken Spanish, so that’s what it sounds like to my mind. This is the first time I’ve had a dream that wasn’t in my native tongue, and now I’m curious if this is common for language students.