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What are the first words learned when living in a foreign country? Well I can tell you when I started to learn Spanish words the first ones I picked up and began to use were the swear words. Why is that? Why do we focus on the negative aspects of a language first? The first thing we want to be able to do is yell at people and express our displeasure eloquently. Why do we not instead ask how to say something is amazing, or delicious, or fabulous? So to learn these important Spanish…

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Like just about anything these days learning Spanish is a service that can be found on the internet. Nowadays it is possible to order just about anything you want on the internet, so much so that you could probably live a very long time without ever having to leave your house or interact with another human being. How you can learn a language this way though is lost on me.

I guess it is possible to memorize words and grammar rules. You can gain an understating of the structure…

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Spanish is, after Mandarin Chinese and English, the third most spoken language in the world, with an estimated 400.000.000 of native speakers throughout the planet. Its origins, however, are much more reduced, both geographically and numerically.

Together with other initially European languages such as Portuguese, French or Italian, the linguistic roots of Spanish make it a Romance language. This means that Latin, or more specifically, Vulgar Latin, constitutes its most…

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Learning Spanish – Part 9 – Learning Spanish Through Cultural Immersion

In my last article I talked a little bit about the benefits of learning about Spanish / Latin American culture and how it can help you with your Spanish language studies. I then went on to talk about my early experiences of trying to communicate in Spanish to the locals of Tijuana in Mexico. It was at this point that I realised that learning Spanish was probably going to take a lot longer and require more…

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The American money system is logical and very easy to use. It is based on the dollar ($1.00), on which all cash and coins are dependent. There are 100 cents in a dollar. Coins are parts of one dollar, for example: a quarter ($0.25) is 1/4 of a dollar, a dime ($0.10) is 1/10th of a dollar, and so forth. Paper bills are multiples of a dollar: for example, a $5 bill. US Paper Currency The twenty, ten, five, and one are the most frequently used bills.

When…