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?