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.

Many Spanish student find the trilled RR sound the hardest sound in Spanish to learn, but I've long thought that the J sound is more difficult.

Many people learn that the j is pronounced like the English "h" sound, but while that's close it's not entirely accurate. Read more...

Did you know that there are more people who speak Spanish as a first language than speak English as a first language? Or that there's a family relationship between Spanish and German? For these and other interesting details about Spanish, be sure to check our our new feature, "10 Facts About the Spanish Language."

As readers informed me to my chagrin after I answered a question about how to say "Halloween" in Spanish, there is a not-so-awkward Spanish phrase to refer to the holiday, and it's día de brujas or noche de brujas, the day or night of witches. Either those terms or "Halloween" is well understood among Spanish speakers in the U.S., although the English term may need some explanation abroad.

Halloween as celebrated in the U.S. is part of American culture, but there are variations of the season that are observed elsewhere. One of the best-known is the Day of the Dead observed in Mexico, which has different origins than Halloween despite is superficial similarities.

Finally in our series of pronunciation lessons, we've come to a letter that is pronounced the same way nearly all the time in both Spanish and English. So our lesson on pronouncing the f is the easiest in the series so far. So you can relax a bit this week; next we'll cover the letters g and j, which can be fairly difficult for native English speakers to pronounce well.

Another sign of language frictions in the United States surfaced this week when the Dallas News reported that at least 20 Dallas police officers since 2007 wrote tickets to at least 38 drivers for not speaking English. According to the newspaper, nearly all of those 38 were Spanish speakers. Read more...

When do you use de and when do you use desde? Or por and para? They're not always easy questions to answer. But words such as those, known as prepositions, are vital to building Spanish sentences. To help you fill in your gaps of knowledge on prepositions, we have new quiz on prepositions. You can answer anywhere from four to 20 questions, and nobody except you will know what answers you get wrong. Enjoy!