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.

How early does language learning begin? It may begin even before we're born, a newly published study suggests. The study, in this month's issue of Current Biology, compared the cries of newborns in French-speaking homes with those in German-speaking homes. According to the researchers, the differences in their cries correspond to differences in the intonations of the two languages. So the assumption is that they picked up the sounds while they were in the womb.

So next time you're jealous when you run across a 2-year-old who speaks Spanish better than you do, remember that she may have been learning the language longer than you have!

Things that can make verb conjugations tricky — there are quite a few irregular verbs and verbs need to be "taken apart" before the ending is added — don't really apply to the conditional tense. Indeed, the conjugation of the conditional tense is one of the easiest to learn. With few exceptions, just add an ending to a verb and you're ready to go.