Best foreign language study book

Quote from Maverick74:

Yeah I'm dedicated towards learning Spanish. I've briefly watched those Spanish cable channels and I'm just not there yet. The problem is they speak 100 miles an hour and roll all their words together.
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Hahaha, I'm learning Spanish as well, and I'm experiencing the same whenever I watch Univision.

They talk very, very fast!
 
Quote from DrEvil:

I learned spanish from the Michel Thomas Audio courses ... I cannot recommend it highly enough. He also does French, Italian and German
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I heard good things about Michael Thomas. Can you expand a little bit more about what you liked about that particular course?
 
It's far more practical to just watch dvd's with Spanish selected as the audio and English subtitles. Newscasts and/or television programs without subtitles are just too advanced and difficult to understand until you have a real mastery of all the vocabulary, verb tenses, etc.

IMO, Spanish is far easier to learn than French ever was. Even after years of French in school, I had a hard time with the conversational aspects. Spanish, on the other hand, can be picked up relatively quickly.
 
Quote from vulture:

It's far more practical to just watch dvd's with Spanish selected as the audio and English subtitles. Newscasts and/or television programs without subtitles are just too advanced and difficult to understand until you have a real mastery of all the vocabulary, verb tenses, etc.

IMO, Spanish is far easier to learn than French ever was. Even after years of French in school, I had a hard time with the conversational aspects. Spanish, on the other hand, can be picked up relatively quickly.
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Watching DVD's with the Spanish audio and SPANISH will help immensely. Watching with the English subtitles can become a crutch where you don't immerse yourself in Spanish. Also, when listening to conversation, sometimes you are not sure of the Spanish word the speaker is using and you can sus it out with the subtitles.

In the general sense , they French, Spanish, Italian, etc are all romance languages and are about the same. Now if you were comparing Spanish to Japanese...
 
Quote from Maverick74:

I heard good things about Michael Thomas. Can you expand a little bit more about what you liked about that particular course?
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Without going into too much detail, his courses aim to make language learning fun. I found other courses a chore, but with Michel Thomas he urges you to just relax and leave the responsibility of learning the language with him. I should add though, that there is no reading or writing involved. So although I speak spanish i have little experience in reading or writing ... I aim to remedy that by reading spanish books.
 
Quote from a529612:

The best way to learn a foreign language is to learn the basics first and then go to that country and live and breathe in it. You'll learn it fast in that kind of "sink or swim" environment.
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Agree. There is no better way.
 
Does anyone have any opinion on these college texts: Sabias que? and Punto y aparte? These are texts that are used at NIU in Chicago for Spanish 101, 102 and 201, 202 level courses.
 
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