This post was originally posted on Babelhut.
I was on the phone with my friend Patrick, who has been my friend for about 12 years, and one of the things we discussed was our study of Spanish. Patrick has gone a little further than I have and I found his description of his study habits interesting. He doesn’t use an SRS program like myself or Thomas, but through his use of Rosetta Stone he has had some similar results to what users of SRS programs have seen. I asked him to write a brief description of his study methods so that I can post them here:
The method I’ve been using to learn Spanish so far consists of a grammar book called “The Pocket Idiot’s Guide to Spanish Phrases“, and the Rosetta Stone program. I also have a bilingual Spanish dictionary for words i come across that are new.
Rosetta Stone: So far this has had a positive effect for teaching me new words, masculine or feminine gender of words, and sentence structure. It sticks mostly in only one verb tense so far. (The present progressive or gerunds.) I think the subjunctive is more used than any other verb tense, but not sure. The only issue i have with this is that it doesn’t cover much ground being mainly in one tense. It does however make the words stick in your head and its not so repetitive that you get bored with it.
The grammar book: Shows all the verb tenses and when they are used. With example sentences in each tense, you could listen to Rosetta Stone and after a bit start to pick up the slight differences of a word in each tense you just read it in. The best thing about the book is that it is straightforward and simple. If you were to go over the charts for each verb tense and write down a couple of sentences you will start to catch the patterns in it.
Patrick also pointed me to a couple of new resources that he plans to try out soon:
- Livemocha.com – Patrick just signed up for this so he doesn’t have any real feedback about it yet, but it looks like a good language learning social network site.
- Learning Spanish Like Crazy – Patrick had heard that was a good companion to learning with Rosetta Stone and intends to purchase this soon.