As I progressed from a beginner, to an intermediate learner, and finally an advanced user of Spanish, I found that different areas of my Spanish ‘skill set’ (reading, writing, listening, speaking) developed at different rates. One month I was speaking really well but having real trouble listening, three months later I suddenly felt that my listening comprehension had overtaken my speaking skills!

Once or twice a year it pays to identify where your Spanish is weakest, and concentrate hard on that area for a while, to choose a ‘Primary Focus’ for a month or two. Feel like your reading comprehension is a little behind your listening? Focus on that for a month by reading as many web pages, news articles and books in Spanish as you can get your hands on. Feel your spoken Spanish is falling behind? Get an intercambio, join a meetup.com group, talk to yourself in Spanish in the car, take some classes with Marina…

By occasionally choosing to work extra hard on one piece of the puzzle, you should make progress in giant leaps. Try focusing on one area of your Spanish for the next month, and why not let us know if you notice a big difference at the end of that time. Then you can go back to an all round approach until, a few months down the line, you notice that your grammar for example, or writing, need a month at the top of the agenda again!

Is your New Year’s Resolution to improve your Spanish this year?

Here are a few ideas to get you going:

1. Join, or create, a local Spanish enthusiasts meet up, with meetup.com – read more about this here, in the forum.

2. Make a list of three or four grammar points you feel you have never got the hang of and resolve to clear them up once and for all. Spanish.about.com has great explanations for this sort of thing. Still annoyed by saber and conocer for example? I finally managed to clear up the four ‘porques’ last week!

3. Plan a trip to Spain or South America. But steer clear of touristy areas, and you will have much more chance to use your Spanish. Just knowing you will have to test your Spanish later in the year can provide a big motivation boost.

4. This one is really random: make a video diary in Spanish and publish it on youtube! Just make sure you tell us about it afterwards!

5. Share your favourite words, ask questions, look for interesting resources in the Learning Spanish section of the Notes in Spanish Forum!

Over to you: more ideas in the comments below please!

We spoke before about Spanish social news sites Fresqui and Meneame. The latest to hit the scene is Wikio. Users vote a good range of stories to the front page (not too much tech, as tends to happen with these sites), hopefully meaning that others do all the hard work in finding us interesting things on the Spanish side of the net.

Gentilicio es un adjetivo que nos indica la procedencia geográfica de las personas o su nacionalidad.

En algunos casos son muy parecidos al nombre de la ciudad o paí­s.
Ejemplos:

- Persona de Valencia – valenciano / valenciana

- Persona de Sevilla – sevillano / sevillana

- Persona de España – español / española

Sin embargo otros gentilicios cambian mucho respecto al nombre del lugar.
Ejemplos:

- Persona de Buenos Aires – bonaerense

- Persona de Huesca – oscense

- Persona de Valladolid – vallisoletano / vallisoletana

- Persona de Salamanca – salmantino / salmantina

Si tienes dudas sobre algún gentilicio en concreto puedes encontrar una lista muy completa en la wikipedia

¡Ah!… y no te olvides de que los gentilicios siempre se escriben con minúscula.

A diferencia del inglés, en castellano los dí­as de la semana y los meses del año no empiezan por mayúscula.

Ejemplo:

- En España, el dí­a de la madre es el primer domingo de mayo.

Ocurre lo mismo con las lenguas, en inglés escribirí­amos English or Spanish. Sin embargo en castellano escribiriamos: inglés o español.

Ejemplo

- Ahora que tengo tanto tiempo libre me he apuntado a clases de inglés y de francés.

Jerga, argot, or Spanish slang, may change year by year, but there are a few core phrases that always hit the mark. I was surprised by the BBC Cool Spanish link mentioned in comments below, some of it is quite, well, racey for the BBC! (Although the delivery of some terms, like the wonderful ¡Hostia! is rather tame).

Meanwhile Jergas de Habla Hispana is an interesting project, trying to bring together all the slang from all the Spanish speaking countries around the world. The interface is slightly confusing, but there’s a lot in there, just check out all the ‘C’ words in Spanish!

Do you get your tech news (and more) from Digg.com? I have just stumbled upon two Spanish versions that may be of interest to the technophiles amongst you: Fresqui and Meneame

Happy surfing!

Hopefully there will be some useful ideas in here for everyone, even if you are just studying Spanish in Spain for a week or two, or swatting up at home. The following is based on my personal experience of going from zero to fairly fluent in 9 months:

1. Not at all essential, but…
If you can spend 9 months in a Spanish speaking country, you’re half way there! Once you get here, the following tips should really help you to speak fluent Spanish within 9 months or less…, but they will still really help if you stay at home too! (more…)

If only all of us took notes like Tim Gambrill’s while we were studying Spanish… Tim G (who you may have come across in our forum) has been studying Spanish since 1998, and has taken his level all the way to the top. Luckily for the rest of us, Tim has put his incredibly detailed notes on the Internet, creating a fantastic Spanish grammar website that we really recommend checking out.

We asked Tim how he came to put this great resource on the web, and for a couple of tips for anyone keen to learn Spanish: (more…)

This is another new feature that we hope to run once a week here at Notes in Spanish. And we’d love your help! If you have a great tip for learning spanish, send us details via an email and we’ll publish it here (send us a photo along with your idea and we’ll publish that too, so everyone knows who had the great idea!)

To get started, we have two top tips this week:

1. Use a new word 6 times!

A linguistics expert once told us that in order to commit a new word to memory we have to use it 6 times. So, next time you hear a great new Spanish word and want to commit it to memory, find 6 ways to use it as soon as possible – speaking in class, thinking random sentences, writing a post using the word in the Spanish part of our forum… it really does work!

2. Speaking of the forums… The ‘El Pais’ test.

The number of tips you can pick up in the Learnin Spanish section of the forum is incredible. Here’s one of our favourites, from Steve W.:

When I’m learning anything I like lots and lots of examples, and sometimes the textbooks are a bit sparse. When I’ve learned a new word or especially a phrase, I type it into google and follow it with site:elpais.es (or another grammatically correct site).

e.g. “al menos de” site:elpais.es

…this will return a list of articles using that phrase, from the El Pais website. Pick one and search for the phrase on the page and there is your example. Guaranteed to be used correctly.

Thanks Steve! Don’t forget to send us any top tips, and if you haven’t yet, why not register in the forum and join us for a chat?