Best way to learn Spanish in conjunction with Duolingo

[Ocio93]

Greetings,

I'm an American who has been studying Spanish through Duolingo. It's a great free iPhone app, but there's an issue: it gives no context or background when dealing with grammar! No verb tables or real in-depth lessons. Everything is immersive and the technical part of learning a language is left by the wayside, so to speak. I started to learn Italian at 8 years old through mandatory instruction in school and studied for many years this way from elementary school through high school, so I am very comfortable with the traditional way of learning a language. However, I don't want to pay for lessons and sit through a classroom, so I'm wondering if any of you might be able to recommend some textbooks or online resources for Spanish grammar. I'd also be interested in any apps that are a little more fleshed out than Duolingo.

I have been considering changing my base language and learning Spanish through Italian. I'm not sure how well that would work out, but I'm willing to experiment. Any thoughts on this?

Thanks for reading!

Ocio93

[Brun Ugle]

Note also that Duolingo does have some grammar notes for their courses, but they aren't accessible from the app. You have to go to the website to see them. From the web version, you can click on a "skill" to see any associated notes. Some courses actually have pretty good grammar notes, but Spanish wasn't one of them. It's possible that they've improved them since I used it though.

[blaurebell]

It depends on your goals. Personally I study for comprehension first and use Duolingo web version for a quick grammar overview. There are some basic grammar explanations in that version and they are usually enough to recognise the grammar when reading. The only thing I would suggest additionally to that would be a good overview over the pronunciation, because otherwise bad subvocalisation while reading might hurt your progress with listening comprehension and pronunciation later on. Also, after knowing how everything is pronounced you might suddenly realise that you already understand a great deal thanks to the overlap between Spanish and Italian. This is what happened to me with Italian after learning Spanish and French.

A good strategy for working on the sound system is minimal pairs listening drills followed by shadowing. Minimal pairs drills are available either at the beginning of the free FSI Spanish Basic course or in Gabriel Wyner's pronunciation trainers. As an American it probably makes more sense to stick to Mexican pronunciation rather than Iberian Spanish from Spain. Finding good material for shadowing is a bit tougher for Latin American accents, but as long as you don't pick Argentinian (like me ) it shouldn't be too hard. Pimsleur is a good source for example and maybe you can get it from the library.

As for grammar: If you aim for comprehension first, then grammar isn't so important, but for good speaking skills you can't really get away without it. By far the best course for grammar is the audiolingual course FSI Spanish Basic, which you can find for free online. The only problem with that one is that it's somewhat boring and also a little strange because it was meant for training future diplomats - you'll be learning how to be polite to the general's wife and strange stuff like that. Personally I kind of enjoy it, because it has a weird 1960s spy movie feel to it, but I can only do it when I can really concentrate on it. It's not something to follow in the car. If you manage to struggle your way through it, you will speak very nicely afterwards, it's really an excellent course, but well, you'll need a bit of grit for that one. Another excellent resource for grammar is Gramática de Uso del Español which has three levels full of exercises and is pretty thorough. It's Iberian Spanish, so some of the usage of past tenses doesn't quite match for Latin America and the vosotros form also isn't used in Latin America, but those differences are really minor.

In any case, since you're already fluent in Italian, Spanish should be really easy for you and you'll recognise the grammar effortlessly without studying it explicitly. It's really very similar and Spanish grammar is even a little easier. So, reading and listening right from the start shouldn't be a problem at all. Even listening will probably be very transparent once you figure out how everything is pronounced.

[Cainntear]

I have been considering changing my base language and learning Spanish through Italian. I'm not sure how well that would work out, but I'm willing to experiment. Any thoughts on this?

I would never advise learning one language through another unless:
a) you live, breathe and work it
and
b) there's no decent material via your own language.

There will always some subtle point of the language that you just don't understand, and if you don't understand something in Italian that is required to explain something in Spanish, you're not going to get it.

My normal advice to an English speaker learning Spanish would be Michel Thomas, but he doesn't do verb tables, and as you've specifically asked for that, I'd suggest Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses. It covers all the tenses pretty well, and teaches them well too. Some similar books keep things too simple and compartmentalised, but this one tends to integrate stuff into sentences reasonably effectively.

[Ocio93]

Thank you all for your speedy replies. I will explore your great suggestions!

I may take a look a Wikipedia's IPA table for Spanish to help with pronunciation. I've used it as a reference before for other things.

[sarmint]

There are a lot of grammar in Duolingo. I really like duolingo, but I also constantly try out other free and non-free apps and sites, memrise, fluentu, hellotalk, linguist and many more. But I always return to Duolingo since for me it's fun and not so focused on learn boring typical tourist sentences but are built around themes.

Here I took some screenshot from Spanish tree (I don't learn Spanish but just to show you)

IMG_0516.PNG

IMG_0517.PNG

Best of future wishes

[Cavesa]

I must say I wasn't impressed with the Spanish course on Duolingo. I'd say the better question is "Best way to learn Spanish" and having Duolingo as one of the supplementary exercise sources.

1.For grammar, there are excellent sources like Gramatica de Uso del Espanol, but many more.

2.Since you know Italian, you can start with monolingual Spanish sources right away. There are many classroom aimed courses that are good, just need to be supplemented with other resources (like grammar books and more listening and so on). Edelsa and Difusion are popular publishers, some make even intensive courses, which might let you benefit from your previous experience.

3.For conjugations, there are awesome drill courses on Memrise by user edthird, three courses with everything you need. You might like to use the ignore button at first and choose verbs/levels as you go. No confusion by translation of either the vocabulary or grammar terms (translating grammar terms in language learning is something I find evil ). Here is a link to one of the three courses: https://www.memrise.com/course/425987/s ... ations-ir/

4.If your Italian is good, than your passive Spanish will progress extremely fast. You may be reading an easier normal book or watching an easier tv series in Spanish in two months. That is great, helpful, and fun. But don't be surprised, when your active skills lag behind, it is still a new language. While the system and logic is very similar and so is vocabulary, lots of things will be different. Sometimes the differences will be tiny (and the more difficult to remember), sometimes big, sometimes the main difference will be how to use something. Don't let this shock you.

5.A tip on keeping Spanish separate from Italian in your brain: listen a lot. Your course's CDs will help a lot, if you really spend the time with them. Anything else (music, podcasts, and so on) will help too. The langauges are much more different to the ears than on paper

6.I agree with Blaurebell a lot. Especially when it comes to pronunciation. Invest time in it, it will pay off!

7.Comparing Spanish and Italian will be useful at times, a good quality Italian resource: why not. But I think you'll be much better off splitting the languages, and using your advantage to learn from excellent monolingual sources right away (point 2 of my list of ideas).

I hope some of this will be useful. Have fun

[tarvos]

I have been considering changing my base language and learning Spanish through Italian. I'm not sure how well that would work out, but I'm willing to experiment. Any thoughts on this?

I would never advise learning one language through another unless:
a) you live, breathe and work it
and
b) there's no decent material via your own language.

There will always some subtle point of the language that you just don't understand, and if you don't understand something in Italian that is required to explain something in Spanish, you're not going to get it.

My normal advice to an English speaker learning Spanish would be Michel Thomas, but he doesn't do verb tables, and as you've specifically asked for that, I'd suggest Practice Makes Perfect: Spanish Verb Tenses. It covers all the tenses pretty well, and teaches them well too. Some similar books keep things too simple and compartmentalised, but this one tends to integrate stuff into sentences reasonably effectively.

I actually think that's good - then I can refresh that point in Italian too. But generally, for things like Shanghainese, you're just going to need Mandarin either way.

[Cainntear]

I actually think that's good - then I can refresh that point in Italian too.

But what if you're not aware that you don't know it? If you're missing some subtlety of usage, you could misunderstand the point entirely. (Plus also my usual caveat about "frustration" and "confusion" being the opposite of learning.)

[tarvos]

Ok, so you make a mistake, and you fix it. Unless you're a professional user of Spanish/Italian, in which cases mistakes count; otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Honestly missing a subtle point of usage is only really an interesting problem when you're at the C-levels anyway. I really don't find it that big of a deal. 99% of it will be okay in context, and if your Spanish is good enough that that one subtle mistake sticks out like a sore thumb, best to just spit it out and see if anyone takes the bait, no?