A language learners’ forum

Welcome to the Team Spanish TAC 2016 thread!

What is TAC?
TAC stands for Total Annihilation Challenge, but what it really means is "to learn as much as possible in your chosen language(s) during the year, keep a log of your progress, and if you are on a team to join in discussions and help out your teammates as best you can." (quote from Brun Ugle, organizer of TAC 2016)

Who can sign up for Team Spanish?
Anyone who is learning Spanish in 2016. There is no required level or priority of Spanish.

What do members of Team Spanish do?
* learn Spanish throughout 2016
* follow this team thread
* keep a log
* read teammates' logs
* provide community, support, and encouragement to teammates

How do I sign up?
* post in the general TAC 2016 sign-up thread
* either start a log with TAC 2016 in the title or edit a current log to include reference to TAC 2016
* post in this thread with a link to your log
(instructions for editing a log title, subscribing to a thread, and changing notification settings for your subscriptions are here)

Who are the members of Team Spanish and where are their logs?
aliciaftw
Allison (co-leader)
eplumb
gpd9eq (joined in March)
Hank
haziz
jennybenny25
Kalelyn
LMAshton (co-leader)
Mohave
Tomás

---

Monthly Challenges
January: post a self-introduction in Spanish
Allison
Hank
Kulelyn
LMAshton

February: post 3 posts in the Conversación en español thread
Allison
Hank

March: choose a Spanish language song you like, post the lyrics, and/or whatever else you want to share (English translation, what you like about it, a cool turn of phrase you want to emphasize, whatever...)
Allison
Hank
and AlexTG

April: pick an article in the Spanish language Wikipedia, read it, and post here about it
Allison
Hank
and arthaey

May: find out about a holiday celebrated in a Spanish speaking country and tell us about it
Allison
Hank
and James29

This is a list of resources. If you have anything to add or change, please post in the thread or PM me.

Self-learning courses

• Assimil
• The Living Language Ultimate Spanish Series (Beginner-intermediate and Advanced)
• Sandberg's Spanish for Reading
• FSI Spanish courses, downloadable for free at the link

Online Dictionaries

• Diccionario de la lengua española, a monolingual dictionary
• Word Reference (the forum can be especially helpful if you're having trouble with a phrase or idiom that the dictionary isn't helping with)
• SpanishDict
• Linguee, which has a lot of example translations used on real websites

Podcasts

• Buenos Días América, 30 minutes, Monday-Friday, directed at a Latin American audience, focusing primarily but not entirely on US news
• Radio Ambulante, with episodes and transcripts available in both Spanish and English
• Notes in Spanish

Graded readers

• Difusión graded (CEFR [A2, B1, etc.]) Spanish Readers

News in Spanish

• El Diario NY
• BBC Mundo
• VOA Noticias
• CNN Español
• NHK World
• Associated Press
• Global Voices
• El Nuevo Día Puerto Rico
• Democracy Now!

Grammar practice

• Gramática de uso del Español, of which there are three volumes (A, B, and C), republished as McGraw-Hill Beginning Spanish Grammar, Intermediate, and Advanced
• Avateca, an archive of online activities provided by the Virtual Cervantes Institute, divided by CEFR levels A1, A2, B1, B2, and C1
• StudySpanish.com's grammar tutorial, with explanations and practice quizzes and tests
• Conjuguemos Verb Conjugation Activities

Flash cards

• Anki, a popular SRS program that is highly customizable
• A 5000-word Anki deck, complete with pictures and recordings
• Duolingo
• Memrise

Sites to have writing corrected by native speakers

• Lang-8

Watching TV or films

• Destinos, a show for Spanish language learners with 52 episodes of 30 minutes each
• Extr@, a show for Spanish language learners with 13 episodes of 25 minutes each. Accompanying materials, including an outline, activities, and transcripts are available for episodes 1-4, episodes 5-8, and episodes 9-13
• Instantwatcher.com search for TV shows on Netflix (US) that have Spanish audio, which you can use to find dubbed or native shows (you can also change the search parameters to find movies or a particular kind of TV)

Reading and listening activities

• GLOSS
• Veinte Mundos
• Lyrics Training
• Spanish Proficiency Exercises

Useful places around language-learners.org

• Español forum, where only Spanish is allowed. Join in one of the threads or create your own. There is a book club happening in this forum.
• Spanish language profile

Other challenges

• 6 Week Challenges
• The Super Challenge

Team Spanish is hereby created! I was eager to have a Team Spanish, so I stepped up to start the team, but I would welcome a co-leader, help with the list of resources for the second post here, and any other suggestions you may have.

I'm about to go through the TAC sign-up list to figure out a tentative list of Team Spanish members, but as you can see from the first post, I'd like everyone to post in this thread to officially sign up for Team Spanish to make sure I don't misunderstand anyone's interest.

I'm in! And I'm definitely up for co-leader if you want my help.

Great, I've added you as co-leader. Don't forget to add TAC 2016 to your log title! I'll PM you so we can talk.

I've added a list of "tentative" members, being very broad and including everyone who mentioned Spanish in the TAC sign-up list or were on Brun Ugle's Spanish list, but some people were saying they didn't want to join too many teams and I know there are/will be two other teams for Spanish-learners, so no worries if you don't want to join.

In general I would assume that anyone who is on another Spanish team, probably would not be interested in being on two. They might not even read this log. You can check on the first page of the TAC sign-up thread to see who that would be. You might want to contact some of the others (who aren't on another team) to ask if they want to join you. There were people expressing interest in a team earlier, but that was before the teams existed.

I'll be stopping by later with some tips and resources when the holidays are over and everything gets back to normal.

Count me in! My log, which I started over a month ago is here:

viewtopic.php?t=1566

Please include in your resources reference to the Difusión graded (CEFR [A2, B1, etc.]) Spanish Readers and to Radio Ambulante. Reference to Assimil, The Living Language Ultimate Spanish Series, and Sandberg's Spanish for Reading, would also be welcome.

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Spanish- ... 44&sr=1-15

http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Spanish- ... h+Advanced

http://www.amazon.com/Spanish-Reading-S ... 357&sr=1-2

I started a separate thread on the Difusión books since I saw no other references to them, here or on HTLAL. I have no vested interest in any of the above resources, just a happy customer.

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=1828

P.S. I am finding the posting of HTML hyperlinks on this forum to be far from intuitive.

Hey Allison, great job setting up Team Spanish! It's something I wanted to see happen but was hesitant to start myself.

As Brun Ugle suggested, given that I am already part of Stelle's upper intermediate/advanced Spanish team, I won't be joining this one.

I will, however, be following the thread with great interest.

¡Buena suerte!

I'm glad that you started a Spanish team for beginners!

I won't be joining, since I'm already leading the int/adv team. The reason I started that team is that I found that advanced learners' needs were very different from beginners' needs.

But I'll be following your team with interest, and I'll be happy to suggest resources if anyone's looking for anything in particular!

¡Buena suerte!

Hello Allison. Thank you for taking on the burden of creating the Spanish team. I'm confirming that I'll be joining.