Obras de Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer - Tomo Primero is a collection of stories in Spanish available with recording and text (both plan and PDF). It was produced by Florida’s Educational Technology Clearinghouse that has a lot more audio/text stories in English in its Lit2Go project.
MP3 recordings can be downloaded individually, but nice [...]

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arafalov on September 26th, 2007

These are new style language-learning websites that are trying to leverage community and/or new capabilities allowed by the internet:

SpanishSense - they have podcasts, PDFs, daily emails and a lot more. This site has been done by the same people who have been doing really successful ChinesePod for several years now. It looks very slick.
LiveMocha - [...]

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arafalov on July 7th, 2007

WordChamp and LingQ are competing online language learning services that use learner driven approach and try to support multiple languages. WordChamp is a (recently) free service. LingQ is free during the current beta stage, as it is a rewrite of the existing paid English-only service The Linguist. Because both services try to be language-agnostic, [...]

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arafalov on April 24th, 2007

I really like WordChamp to help me with learning foreign languages. It was good for me when I was learning French. It is good to me now that I am learning Spanish. And the last couple of months it was getting better nearly on a weekly basis.
That did not used to be the case. I [...]

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arafalov on February 21st, 2007

Сегодня - Международный день родного языка. Мой родной язык - Русский! Я горд моим родным языком даже если я не использую его каждый день.
Today - 21st of February - is the International Mother Language Day. My mother language is Russian! I am proud of my mother language, even if I do not get to use [...]

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Is Podcasting revolution over before it began? BusinessWeek seems to think so and quotes Pew Internet & American Life Project’s statistics. The topic is also generating some buzz in the blogosphere, with BusinessWeek’s interpretation being gleefully accepted by some and thoughtfully rejected by others.
I believe into podcasting’s future because it is here already [...]

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arafalov on December 3rd, 2006

(Update for June 2007: The website got reorganised and the link is gone. Fortunately, it was archived by WaybackMachine)
It is quite frustrating how often a good material hides so deep in a random website that it can only be found by total accident.
Such seems to be the case with Suspense, no suspenso. From what [...]

Continue reading about Free spanish e-book for intermediate learners

I was listening to the Trying to Learn Spanish podcast and in its 11th episode somebody mentioned an interesting e-book (Thirteen Senses by Victor Villaseñor) that has parallel English and Spanish text and allows to quickly switch between them.
I like the idea of bilingual books, so I went hunting for it. The book is available [...]

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This is somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but I could not avoid noticing the differences in phrases I am learning in Spanish as compared to the ones I was learning in French.
Both language classes spent a first couple of weeks with Name, Surname, Workplace, Street address, Phone number and suchlike. No surprise there, even though I don’t normally [...]

Continue reading about Spanish are less personally intrusive than French - class experience

arafalov on September 19th, 2006

When I was studying French, my teacher liked to measure out the knowledge at her own pace. If you asked about something that in her study plan was a couple of weeks later, she would pretty much tell you to learn what you are supposed to know first.
Being the kind of person who likes to [...]

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