Friday, January 30, 2009

Twitter as a language learning tool

Really? Yes, I think so. For the last month or so I have started following more native Spanish speakers on Twitter and they have started following me. From meteorology to finances, I’m learning many new words and phrases while at the same time enjoying meeting people from Spain, Argentina, Mexico and other countries.twitter Also, the majority of them have blogs or web sites which you can read and learn even more Spanish. In general, the sites are listed in their profile.

If you want to give this a try, sign up with Twitter, follow me and then check out my followers and who I’m following. Another way is to visit TweetGrid and put in “learn Spanish” or other similar search terms to find people to follow.

Also, keep in mind that you will not always see “perfect” Spanish which is understandable because you’re only given 140 characters to express yourself per tweet. That’s quite challenging at times. You will sometimes see q, k, ke for que, dropped accents and punctuation marks and so on, so this wouldn’t be a good learning tool for beginners. On the flipside, you only have to worry about writing in Spanish in 140 or less characters. Not as much pressure, right?

Hope to see you soon on Twitter! 
_________________________________________________  

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Pocoyó – Elly sobre hielo


Keywords and phrases: It’s all about helping in this video. :)

resbaladizo – slippery (0:10)
el hielo – ice (0:19)
patinar – to ice skate (0:26)
el patinador, la patinadora – ice skater (0:35)
ayudar – to help (1:58) – You’ll hear this word as well as ayuda throughout.
el pulpo – octupus (2:10)
la ballena – whale (2:25)
¡Inténtalo! – Try it! (3:40)
echarle una mano – to give somebody a hand (4:11)
____________________________________________________________________

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Childtopia: Online games and more for children

Quick post to share with you this site that I ran across thanks to the Ñandu email list. The site is called Childtopia and is available in Spanish, French, Catalan, Basque and English. You’ll find the following activities:

childtopia2

I can’t wait to explore it more!
________________________________________