Learning Spanish Pt. 2

The Alhambra in Granada, Spain.

Classes

Traditional

In person — There are lots of opportunities to take classes — whether its at your local community college or college. You can ask to audit classes which tend to be cheaper, but you don’t always get the full advantage of the course.

Traditional Online — I did a lot of research into various online courses to find an inexpensive, high-quality option. What I landed on was UW Milwaukee. You can earn a certificate and it’s very appropriately coursed for beginner to intermediate levels. https://uwm.edu/sce/certificates/spanish-language-certificate/

Tutoring

The most impactful, least costly (depending on how you spend your money) is one-on-one tutoring. Although I regularly miss small group settings, have one on one attention, with the right teacher goes a long way, and allows you very adaptive sessions. This can be in-person or online (like Preply, see below).

The next key to learning a language is as much immersion as you can possibly get.

This rather embarrassing, humorous image is from a tutoring session in which my tutor was sharing his screen with my incredibly tired face in a screen within a screen. When I lived on the east coast, I would take Spanish lessons before work around 5:30 or 6am.

Preply is my favorite tutoring platform.

To be fair, I haven’t tried a lot of others. I tried Preply as both an English teacher as well as a Spanish student. I stick with it because:

• intuitive interface
• it measures how many minutes I spent speaking
• Pricing models are clear and requesting price increases are handled through notifying the student, and rescheduling or moving forward with classes with new prices
• Filters for searching for tutors are clear (native speaker, from a certain country, within a certain availability of hours or range).
• You can save vocabulary in the chat (although I’ve rarely used this feature)