None of us learns words in the same way — I find flashcards boring, but I easily pick up words as I read the latest news from Bogotá or some other Spanish-speaking city. But if I told you to do that to pick up more Spanish words, you might find it boring!

But what works for probably would work for someone somewhere, even if not for best friend. With that in mind, I invite you to share your advice on learning vocabulary, preferably after reading through our overview on learning vocabulary. Thanks!

Read more...

Ask questions like those in a headline, and you might expect a number in the answer. But you might also answer with an adjective of quantity — words like "many" or "few" in English, muchos or pocos in Spanish. Our recently revised lesson on adjectives of quantity lists the ones you'll use the most often and gives examples of how they're used.

After last week's challenge of learning to pronounce the g and j, we're back an easy letter: i. Despite what you might initially think, it basically has what we call the long-E or "ee" sound of English. And once you've mastered the i — it's not hard — you'll also have learned the y.

Without more context, it isn't so easy to translate a simple sentence such as "When I was a child I went to Disneyland" to Spanish. You could say "Cuando era niño fui a Disneyland" or "Cuando era niño iba a Disneyland" — and they don't mean the same thing. If you don't know the difference, be sure to check out recently updated lesson on distinguishing the past tenses of Spanish.