Hi

We are a family currently living in Reading, England and plan to move to Spain next summer (2008).  My husband and I are in our forties and our children are 18, 15, 12 and 11 and NONE of us speak Spanish.

We have a couple self-teaching DVDs and books but it only really seems to be me who is learning that way - and that is painfully slow!

We have thought of sharing our house with a Spanish person but, although have advertised, there has been no response to our adverts as yet.

Spanish lessons for all of us are way out of our budget - so I wonder if anyone else could tell me what worked for them.

Any tips gratefully received.

Julie

my grandfather learned Spanish in his early 70’s (this was probably 30 years ago now) - here’s what he did outside of regular text books:

- watched TV & listened to the radio in Spanish (not hard to do here in Los Angeles)
- read a bunch of Spanish newspapers, magazines and books
- found native speakers to talk with (he used to ride the bus to visit us - a 1.5 hour ride - he’d jump on find people to speak Spanish with)

Perhaps you can find some sort of club with Spanish speaking expats in your area or something?  Is there any local groups for supporters of the big Spanish futbol clubs (maybe for Barcelona or Madrid)? 

good luck!

Have a look at the BBC’s “MUZZY” series of DVD’s, my kids enjoyed it and learnt a great deal at the same time (it may be a bit dated and aimed at younger kids, but still gets the basics across)

Dun Marching

I don’t think there’s any substitute for structured lessons from a native speaker.  Evening classes at my local university in Scotland are about ?140 for twenty two-hour sessions over two terms, so I assume they will be about the same where you are.  This might be expensive for a large family, but ultimately worth every penny if you’re going to move to Spain.  Solutions for self-study can work but they require lots of self-discipline - and it sounds like you’re the only one in your family with any of that!  But anyway, try notesinspanish.com, which offers excellent free podcasts of conversations between an English resident of Madrid and his Spanish wife. I download these and listen to them in the gym. There’s also a brilliant American site called studyspanish.com, on which you get a very logical course (with sound files) that starts with noun gender and goes right up to past-tense subjunctives in about 50 lessons.  Each lesson only takes about twenty minutes, so if you are determined, you can quite easily do one a day.  There are tests and stuff too, and the basic service is free, though you pay for some extras. There’s a series of great books called Practice Makes Perfect available on Amazon; again you should aim to do a little every day. Lastly, try reading the online newspaper http://www.elmundo.es or even better, find the local on-line paper for the region you intend to move to and read that - every province seems to have at least one. In Spain, there are many heavily subsidised classes provided for new arrivals in Spanish and, in Catalunya and the Balearics, in Catalan - you’ll have to check locally for these, but they usually cost pennies. Whatever you do, it’s going to be hard work, and you really do have to learn verb tables and masses of vocabulary.  Any material which promises to make language learning “easy” or “painless” will be either misleading or ineffectual…

Thanks for these responses - some really good ideas there which we will follow up.

I have found some organisations that do formal lessons at home for all the family - which, like Martin says, may be the best place to start.  Will let you know how we get on - I bet the kids will be running rings round me!

Thanks

Julie

Buy your DVDs online from El Corte Ingles or another spanish source.  Then they will be (check of course) in both English and Spanish - sound and sub-titles.  You will find the sub-titles are often an interpretation and not word for word translations.  This I find really useful.  I at first just watched in English with spanish sub-titles - it is amazing you can’t help but pick up odd bits (and hopefully your family will too).  When I had seen the film in English one or two times I went for spanish sound, english subs .........

I also found it useful when I was rarely in Spain to set my main goal to be discovering spain, its culture, its peculiarities, its geography, its wines, its food, gambas, jamon mmmmmmmmmmm .....  Sry.  and not the language.  I hated languages at school so keeping it interesting was vital.

And don’t forget stick-it notes all over the house with the spanish words.  Good Luck

ps someone mentioned verb tables but beware.  When I was at school it was verb tables that put me off languages for 25 years. Yes verbs are important but at an early stage you can get by without endless hours of table learning.

In the UK I’m in Kingsclere, not a million miles from you, and I found hunting down spainish speakers in Basingstoke not too difficult (mostly mature students).  Then I discovered that many Italian restaurants employ spaniards (cheaper) and the italian 500 yds from my house had two spaniards working there. 

Sorry wittering again, good luck with your adventure

All fantastic advice and wholeheartedly agree that once here you will soon pick up Spanish, although accents vary from provence to provence which is always fun!!  The verb thing is a nightmare and so many different ways to say one word!!  My friend and I have a Spanish teacher who comes for two hours every week (we pay her 20 euros and she speaks perfect English!!), its something at least.  I have two very small children, so its great that she comes to my home.  Am pretty sure, once here, you will find a teacher and you will soon pick up the language.  You pronounce every single letter in the word, a few g?s, j?s can be a bit gutteral, and r?s can be a little difficult, but hey, well done on the move and it will all be just fine.

Good luck,

Alicia

Nizzo you make a very good point but unfortunately I for one am rather lacking in answers.  Part of my adopted Spanish family   have lived in Andalucia for centuries (I guess) and the accent and speed of speaking, to say nothing of the slang leave me totally in the dark.  But equally they leave some spanish equally lost.

I tried buying DVDs of traditional spanish films, in particular I liked films by Jose Luis Garci “El Abuelo” and “Historia de un beso”.  I thought being regional and authentic spanish, as opposed to the blandly dubbed US stuff it might help.  Sadly not much but the films were really good.

I guess it just takes time and patience.  Good excuse to spend hours in the bar meeting the locals of course.