Learning Spanish by Distance Learning

Which is the most economical way and which institution provides distance learning programs to learn Spanish at the lowest rates?
Is there such thing as the TOEFL of Spanish.

I once thought of learning Spanish on a scholarship to Spain but the scholarship turned out to be a marketing tool to cough up money to the university upfront without guarantees that you would be paid back by the scholarship program. Smart eh! The Spanish rep spoke condescendingly to me as if the third world was no world and that the only reason why I should go to Spain was because the girls there are beautiful. Just a comment. But I guess if you are a hot blooded male you would bite. Rather expensive way of learning a language.

 

If learning Spanish is your only goal (as opposed to learning it and also accumulating some kind of college credit for it, along the way), then a D/L program is probably not the best way, in any case.

You'd probably -- and this is only an opinion, mind you -- be better off using one of the CD-ROM/DVD-based software products that are floating around out there... but not just any of them. There are some really, really bad ones on the software store shelves or available over the Internet or advertised in magazines.

One of the best that I've found (and if I'm wrong about this recommendation, then maybe I just haven't found the best one yet) is a fairly sophisticated and high-quality system using as close to a full-immersion approach as a computer software format can probably get. It's neither cheap nor terribly expensive, as such products go; and it actually seems to work.

SEE: http://www.rosettastone.com

Hope that helps.

 

It's not distance learning, but a cheap and quick way to learn Spanish is to go to a Latin American country (usually Mexico, Guatemala or Costa Rica... each has different advantages and disadvantages) and study in an immersion program at a private school. I've heard a few of these programs set up a neat system where you can get a big discount by teaching English when you're not busy learning Spanish, since there's always a huge demand for English teachers.

 

Pimsleur is a good way to get basic to intermediate conversational skills in Spanish (or a bunch of other languages). You don't get a lot of vocabulary, but you get the ability to hold conversations about everyday things, and I think it would be a good starting point for further study.

They're rather expensive, but a lot of library systems have the recordings on either CD or cassette.

 

Anyone try Destinos? Anyone do it for credit through the Annenberg whatever-that-is?

 

work and study program

Can anyone recommend any school that you can work and study at the same time in Latin America? I also notice that scholarships to Latin American schools are sparce and sketchy, could it because of their own cash flow problems?

 

Buenas noches!

You may try attending a summer program in a Latin American unversity. They are fairly inexpensive and you will get to meet as many beutiful Spanish blooded ladies s you which. Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica are three good choices I know of.

In the Dominican Republic UNIBE has special programs for "extrangeros".

Buena Suerte...

 

The advantage of public universities is that they are very cheap. For example, UNAM (the national Mexican university) has a language school for foreigners called CEPE. A 6 week, 90-hour Spanish course costs $300 there.

On the other hand the quality is not going to really be the best. More private language schools often use more up-to-date language teaching methods that produce faster results. I've taken Spanish courses at a private school in Costa Rica and also at the UNAM and the UNAM classes were definitely inferior. They were on par with classes taught in universities in the U.S... but these also vary hugely in quality! However, there are also plenty of mediocre private schools that give the same kind of classes for vastly more money than the public universities. If you do decide to go this route try and talk to former students of the school. Also, Spanish courses should not be taught in English. Even at the most basic level it is better to conduct the entire class in the target language. If the class is taught using English that should be a warning sign.

 

As someone who condemns the very existence of Spanish, Romanian, French, Italian, etc., as regrettable developments due to candy-ass progressivism in the teaching of Latin ("oh, using an accusative absolute is quite all right, dearie, we want to reflect cultural diversity and foster barbarian pride, sure, it's fine if you say 'nopte' instead of 'nocte' and drawl your vowels like a Viennese, after all, it's a Dacian thing, you wouldn't understand"), this thread is still really helpful.

Does the Pimsleur thing really work? I'm interested in using it (for another language not always too readily available) and would be interested in your experience with it. What are the strong points of Rosettastone? Are there any programs to just plain avoid? What language learning I've done in the past has been mostly for reading, not so much for speaking, so this is a newish area for me. I appreciate any detailed info.

Gratias ago, oops must'nt be imperialist, I mean multumesc foarte mult,

Janko

 

Hi, Salami, try the Cervantes Institute (Instituto Cervantes) with dozens of offices around the world. They have both oncampus and online instruction that you may take usually for a small fee. They hace several levels. They are the official Spanish language institute of Spain. So they are heavily subsidized. And, yes, there is a Spanish TOEFL, although it is calle something else which is helpful in Spain to seek admission to Universities or secure employment. In the webpage of the Instituto Cervantes there is plenty of information.

And one more thing. As a person who has spent the last 15 years abroad living in several countries, I recommend what most people have told you. Learn your grammar and improve your vocabulary in a clasroom, but practice it somewhere else with a native speaker. There is a about billion Spanish speakers worldwide. You will learn the most when you NEED to speak it! And, as Uncle said (or somehow meant), once you know Spanish you can easily learn a bunch of other languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, etc...) for almost the same price.



Regards

 

You might try a local community college. The one we have here offers Spanish I and II by video telecourse using the Destinos series. It was relatively inexpensive ($68/credit hour + books and CD's) and a pretty good course.

Tim

 

I have an O-Level in French and have not used it in Asia save when I visited abit of Hanoi but even then the people there spoke very little of it only the older generation. I did use French when I visited the Universitie Francois Rabelais de Tours in the Loire region. But I noticed that Spanish is increasingly important especially I would like to visit Latin America and South America one day like Santiago for instance I have heard alot about it. I did ask some Phillipinos if they spoke it but they too are begining to change to English more than Spanish.

However, I do see the importance of Spanish alongside English and Putonghua. The Chinese dialects I speak like Hokkien (Min nan Hua - Taiwanese) and Cantonese (Guangdong) are minor. Of course Bahasa is important which is an everyday language here in South East Asia.

It would be nice if there were a Latin American Council similar to the lines of the British Council here in Kuala Lumpur and MACEE. An establishment like that can then run Spanish programs from certificate to degrees on a distance learning basis with few classroom sessions. I had enquired and the University of Murcia in Spain was interested but there were not enough teachers and the Latin American consulates were rather passive about desseminating their language and culture, although they said they did try with a local public university here in Malaysia but after that nothing much was mentioned thereafter.

 

I don't believe that spoken language can be taught effectively via distance learning. It CAN be taught, but not nearly as well as you would get in a classroom using modern methods.

I can definitely imagine it being developed more in the future. Learning stations would need advanced multimedia capabilities, with videoconferencing at the very least. For example, to teach the Spanish trilled double R, a teacher has to analyze how the student breathes and where they're placing their tongue. And Spanish is relatively easy to learn, compared to an English speaker trying to pronounce words in a tonal language like Chinese...

 

I took Destinos at Coastline Community College, but only because it awarded 5 semester units of credit. I already had several years of high school Spanish, so the class was not difficult. If you are going into the course without any knowledge of Spanish, you really have to work at it and spend time listening to the tapes. The video is pretty interesting, showing travel through Spain and Argentina, with the hacienda located in Mexico. There's also some history about the Spanish Civil War.

 

Spanish Languages

Hi Salami!

Uncle Janko brought up an interesting point. If you decide to take a Spanish course from Spain, I would recommend that it be in Castillian Spanish. Castillian is the most frequently spoken Spanish language. Other official Spanish languages include Galician(galic roots), Catalan, Valencia, Basque, etc. On a international level, Casitillian would be the most usefull to you, and easier to learn.

For example, I have aunts and uncles in Valencia. The Valencian Language is a combination of Castillian Spanish, French and Italian. However, here in California, Valencian is not really known or used, so I must revert to Castillian.

Anyway, I just thought I would bring this up. I have friends who have Masters degrees in Spanish and are not even aware there are many "Official" languages within Spain. Once again, start off with Castillian Spanish if you plan to use it here in the U.S.

I hope I have not confused you too much,

Best of luck,

Sensei Abner I.

 

Thanks. I looked once at Destinos and it didn't seem especially intuitive. It might be for someone else but I don't think it would be for me.

 

In fairness to D/L, generally, I really should have added the following when I wrote the above:

• But if you insist on D/L Spanish; and if it's okay that it's accredited and counts as college credit; and if you want it to be about as inespensive as regionally-accredited college credit gets, try the serious of Spanish classes from LSU:
  
  http://www.is.lsu.edu/courselist.asp?cat=Spanish&nid=102&pg=

Sorry I forgot to add that.

And, that said, I agree with...

I think there's some wisdom there. That's partly why I recommended a CD-ROM/DVD-based course... a really good one, I mean.

Of course, there's probably no substitute for the whole going-to-another-country/full-immersion thing, as others here have advised. That's probably the best.

Yes! It's quite good.

Really, Pimsleur and Rosettastone approach it similarly. It's a full-immersion approach -- much like what happens when you go to another country, as has been suggested elsewhere in this thread. Both programs shy away from translating for you, or drilling you or making you memorize things. In that sense, both programs get you up-to-speed about as quickly as any program could be expected to do.

Pimsleur, it's probably fair to say, tries to fast-track it a bit more by concentrating on lots of really practical stuff that an American who finds himself suddenly living in a Spanish-speaking country would need to know as soon as possible. Pimsleur's claim to fame, so to speak, is that corporations and government agencies who sent their English(only)-speaking people to other countries choose Pimsleur -- even over Berlitz -- to get them ramped-up as quickly as possible. To accomplish this, Pimsleur occasionally resorts to a bit of translating, drilling and memorization (but nowhere near as much as, for example, Berlitz or most of the other, older, more traditional methods do); where Rosettastone treats memorization, translating and drilling more or less like the plague.

Rosettastone takes the full-immersion thing about a half-level up from Pimsleur; and isn't quite so urgent about getting you fluent in a few hundred phrases or sentences that you'll need to exist in another country as is Pimsleur.

Both programs, it's important to point out, really do a good job and I don't mean to make it sound like I necessarily think Rosettastone is better than Pimsleur, or vice versa.

Most programs teach the way most of us learned in high school: By conjugating verbs, memorizing, drilling, etc. Those who have taken Berlitz courses probably remember cassette tapes that you could listen to while driving to work, for example, which give a word or phrase, then coach you to repeat it, etc.

Neither Pimsleur nor Rosettastone do this to speak of. Instead, from the very first moment of the very first lesson, you're hearing Spanish... and, equally importantly, you're seeing the images that go with it which contain information you need to figure out what it all means. There's no one there to tell you, in translation, what what you just heard means. But the system does, in fact, tell you what it means... just in other ways -- ways that mimic how people learn languages in countries where it's common for to know and speak three or four (or more) of them!

Here's how to most easily, but crudely, understand it...

Go to your TV and turn on the Telemundo network (or any one of the other big Spanish-speaking networks). Watch the programming -- especially the news broadcasts -- for hours... days or weeks, even. Eventually you'll begin to spot patterns -- repeated words, used in certain ways, and always when certain images are on the screen, or when people are pointing toward certain things, etc. Do that long enough and you'll begin to figure out what they're talking about -- to the point that you can start closing your eyes and listening and visualizing what they're talking about (a fire truck, for example), and then if you open your eyes while they're still talking about it, sure enough, ther'll be a fire truck on the TV screen. From there, begin to repeat the words and phrases and listen to whether your pronounciation matched theirs... and repeat 'til it does. Do that long enough, and thoughtfully enough, and you'll learn to both understand and to speak the language.

Now, imagine doing what's described in the preceding paragraph, except imagine that just when it starts to get confusing -- almost as if the TV could read your mind -- the newscaster stops and looks you straight in the eye and shows you the images again while either replaying what he said when they appeared the first time, or repeating the words slowly for you to make sure you got it; or -- and this is where it really gets interesting -- pausing to expand on a given word or concept with even more images or demonstrations, and even more words; and then, just as you're nodding in understanding, the TV, as if it saw you do that and realizes that you understand, it resumes the regular broadcast... that is, until it's felt that you need another pause and repeat and expansion. That's kinda' how Pimsleur and Rosettastone do it... only much, much better, of course.

In my opinion -- and it's just an opinion, mind you -- almost everything else (besides Pimsleur or Rosettastone, I mean). There are tons of programs on CD-ROM/DVD that are advertised in magazines, on the Internet and which you can buy in computer and office supply stores -- some good, most just okay-to-not-so-good, and some excruciatingly bad. But one simply cannot go wrong with either Pimsleur or Rosettastone... again, just my opinion.

 

Salami, the Spanish equivalent of the British Council is the Instituto Cervantes. They have offices in South East Asia, and they have a variety of diplomas and qualifications for people with little exposure to Spanish and advanced learners. Many of these courses are taught on a distance learning basis, but also face to face. Here in Holland there is one in Utrecht, for instance, but there are in most countries, including, of course, the States.

 

JVL,

I checked the webpage but Instituto Cervantes is not in Kuala Lumpur. I would rather learn a language and have a certificate to prove that I have gone through the process than private tuition that have been suggested by a few Spanish speaking people living here in Malaysia. It is sad that the language is not really taught to the adult learning population unlike at the YMCA Kuala Lumpur which teaches foreign languages except for Spanish and I did ask them to think about it.

One thing about private tuition is that there is nothing to show for it unless you want to use it on a short term basis and I perfer a distance learning supported by a class room atmosphere. None of the Latin American Universities have been represented here either on a distance learning basis basically I guess we can't get the Spanish speaking facilitators.

 

Salami, first of all, I hope you and everyone else in Malaysia is doing OK.

This thread probably doesn´t make much sense to you now but for the future, if you still want to lear the language, yes, the best way to learn a language is to practice it with native speakers in situations where you MUST make yourself understood. If that is not possible, then perhaps you should try to master it by yourself. The Instituto Cervantes, a non for profit institution, heavily subsidized by the Spanish government provides distance learning of the language. This same center offers as well examinations and diplomas conferred by the Education Ministry of Spain (which is which from this institute directly depends on). You might take examinations elsewhere if Kuala Lumpur doesn´t have an office especially if you travel often abroad. The closest center to your city is Manila.

I keep on forgetting to mention that I am from Spain. I think it is a pretty easy language to learn, and that this Cervantes Institute is probably the best, cheapest option by distance learning. Nevertheless, you might wanna check South American Universities. The most advanced education systems are probably those of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Mexico, and Costa Rica (just an opinion).


Good luck, and best wishes to everyone in South East Asia.