My Spanish course includes:

• A 60-day money back guarantee
• 45 beginners’ online lessons
• 45 kids’ lessons
• Downloadable mp3s
• Downloadable videos
• Online mp3 listening
• Spanish language learning articles
• A Spanish verb ebook
• Beginners’ quizzes
• Kids’ quizzes
• Full access to the members-only forum
• Answers to your language questions by me
• First-rate customer service

At spanish-bookworld.com I have put plenty of details about my course. I’ve also added the Lessons 1, 2 and 3 free samples and free quizzes.

The online lessons, mp3s and videos come with: dialogs, flashcards, grammar, pronunciation and numbers.

All the online lessons are interactive and multimedia, and all the Spanish words and sentences in them have been recorded by native Spanish speakers.

This course has been written and created by me, Maria Fernandez, a highly experienced native Spanish teacher. This is the third Spanish course I’ve published. I’m currently working on a series of Spanish language learning ebooks as well as adding new material to my online course. Find out more about me and Spanish Bookworld.

You can find many more language learning quizzes in my Spanish course. Those quizzes help you review what you learn in the online lessons, downloadable mp3s and videos.

All my quizzes come with listening comprehension questions, grammar drills, vocabulary and number exercises, spelling practice, and much more. Hope you like them!

On my Spanish Bookworld website you can download a free video sample from my Spanish course and put it on your iPod and iPhone, and you can also watch a free video sample online.

You can download the videos and mp3s in my Spanish course when you subscribe. Subscriptions cost $19.99 per month and come with a 60-day money-back guarantee.

My Spanish course contains 45 lessons with 5 videos and 5 mp3s each, plus online lessons, kids’ lessons, articles, an ebook and a members-only forum where you can post me all your Spanish language questions.

1. Estar in the present tense

Here’s what the Spanish verb estar looks like in the present tense and how you translate it:

2. Examples with estar

Here are some examples with the six forms we’ve just learned, in both Spanish and English:

3. When to use the verb estar

Estar is one of two Spanish verbs that translates as ‘to be’. The other verbs is ser, which we’ll learn in a future post.

The verb estar is used to indicate:

• Where people or things are
• Moods and feelings
• Physical conditions
• Physical appearance at some point in time
• Temporary rather than permanent conditions

To illustrate these five points, here are five examples with their English translation:

4. Speaking drill

Can you say these ten sentences in Spanish? You can see the solutions in Spanish and hear them said by native speakers in the Lesson 4 – Grammar of my free Spanish course.

1. How are they?
2. They’re angry
3. Which hotel are you (vosotros) in?
4. We’re in the Arizona hotel
5. Where are you (tú)?
6. Is he at the hotel?
7. Is she on the beach?
8. You’re (tú) looking very elegant
9. I’m on vacation
10. Are they on vacation?

To get this and other grammar lessons:

1. Rushing through your first Spanish lessons

Having a sound knowledge of the basics will determine how fast, and how well, you can learn Spanish.

If you’re a complete beginner, concentrate on each and every lesson of your course, from the beginning, for as long as you need. Do not rush yourself. If a lesson takes you three hours, so be it, but never allow yourself to skip any material.

Basically, the more time you put into the first lessons, the faster you’ll be able to learn later on.

If you’re past the beginners’ level but have some gaps in your knowledge, stop learning new material and go back to the beginning. This may sound drastic, boring, defeating or simply mad, but it will work wonders and no doubt boost your confidence in no time.

To succeed, follow this routine: review all the words you have learned so far. Make sure you understand all the grammar you have covered. Do not allow yourself to make more than one mistake per exercise or drill. Listen to the dialogs until you can say them out loud along with the recordings.

Remember: small gaps at the beginning become enormous holes by lesson twelve. By lesson twenty, giving up will feel like the only way out.

2. Not focusing on the Spanish pronunciation

Working on your pronunciation might not be the obvious thing to do as a beginner, but it has many great advantages:

• The better your pronunciation is, the better you’ll be able to understand native speakers.
• Having a good accent is hugely rewarding and motivating.
• Having a good accent from the start also allows you to avoid bad pronunciation habits that aren’t always easy to get rid of.

The best way to improve your pronunciation is to concentrate on one letter of the alphabet at a time, and then on words you’re having difficulty with. To get a good Spanish accent, make sure you learn only from native Spanish speakers.

Acquiring a very good accent requires patience and perseverance, no doubt, but once you start working on it you’ll notice some improvement almost from the start. Guaranteed!

3. Learning Spanish nouns without ‘el’ or ‘la’

Whenever you learn a Spanish noun with its article, you’re avoiding endless future mistakes. In other words, you’re saving yourself a lot of time and unnecessary, repetitive work.

As you may know, the Spanish gender rules can help you ‘guess’ the gender of many words, especially those ending in ‘a’ and ‘o’, but there are many nouns that will let you down if you try to guess their gender. That’s why it’s safer, and faster, to learn them all with their article when you first come across them.

The good news is that any good Spanish course gives you every new noun with its article.

Warning: Unfortunately, there are many Spanish courses that still teach nouns without their article. To avoid wasting your time, make sure the Spanish course you get gives you the new vocabulary with ‘el’ and ‘la’. The simplest way to do it is by checking the free lessons before buying the full product. If there are no sample lessons, get a different course!

Useful Spanish learning material

Free Spanish course
Spanish pronunciation lessons

All the kids’ lessons in my free Spanish course are interactive: they include multimedia flashcards you can see and hear, speaking exercises and listening drills.

Like all my other Spanish lessons, mp3s and videos, they have been recorded by native speakers.

The kids’ lessons in my courses include topics such as: the family, numbers, animals, colors, names, greetings, professions, the time, asking questions; useful words like ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘some’, ‘and’, ‘I’, etc.; the alphabet, the days of the week, food, clothes, and more.

If you want to see the full list of topics, here is the lesson plan.

To show you what the interactive multimedia lessons for kids in my free Spanish course look like, here are five snapshots:

 

Sign up for free!

The online lessons have five sections: dialog, flashcards, grammar, pronunciation and numbers.

The online lessons, mp3s and videos all include learning material, speaking exercises and listening drills. They’ve all been recorded by native Spanish speakers.

This free Spanish course is available to you right now. Hope you like it! Below are some snapshots from the course.

There you can download the free samples, or listen to them online, and you can also download the videocast samples.

All my podcasts have been recorded by me and other native Spanish speakers, with clear explanations and prompts in English.

To show you what my podcasts sound like, here’s the Lesson 8 dialog podcast sample:

As a Spanish language teacher, here are 4 tips I’ve found will help you stop forgetting the words you’ve come across:

1. Learn new words with audio material rather than from print only

The difference between learning new Spanish words by reading them in your lesson’s glossary and hearing them said by a native speaker is abysmal.

Hearing new words said by a native speaker, preferably with their English translation afterwards, will not only make you familiar with those words substantially faster, but it will also allow you to remember them more easily.

There are dozens of good Spanish courses with audio material on cd, dvd, cd-rom, podcast and videocast that can help you do just that; and most of them are very affordable.

Check out this example of a vocabulary lesson online, on mp3 and videocast.

2. Learn new words in context

Whenever you learn a new Spanish word, make sure you also hear it in context. Remembering lists of words without context is practically impossible for most of us, because the human brain works best by making associations. In my view, dialogs are the most effective tool for learning new vocabulary.

As an example, here’s the dialog where you can hear all the new words listed in the vocabulary lesson above. You can see and hear it in three formats: online, as an mp3 and a videocast.

3. Find similarities between words

If you can find a similarity between a Spanish word you’ve just come across and another Spanish word you already know or, better still, an English word, you won’t forget it easily.

For instance, when you first see the word encantado (pleased to meet you) you can associate it to enchanted (which it’s related to), or el vino (the wine) to the vineyard.

Other associations are less strong, but they can still help you a long way. Here are some Spanish and English words with the same origin:

I find this way of learning new words so effective that I’ve included word associations throughout my Spanish course, and continue adding new ones to the lessons whenever I find them.

4. Review your vocabulary with audio material regularly

The secret of success, when it comes to mastering Spanish, is to review your material regularly. Listen to your dialogs and vocabulary lessons as frequently as you can. Repeat them out loud, along with the recordings, with and without the printed text in front of you. In other words, make reviewing part of your study routine.

Reviewing always pays off. The more often you review what you’ve learn, the more solid your knowledge will be, and the faster you’ll be able to learn and remember new words.

This is what our Spanish for beginners cd-rom looks like:

 

 

 

 

This cd-rom contains 99 student-friendly lessons and 225 speaking, listening, reading and writing drills. All the lessons and drills are interactive, and have been recorded by native Spanish speakers.

In addition to that, the cd-rom also includes an interactive multimedia Spanish pronunciation guide and a talking dictionary with over 800 headwords.

To help you keep track of your progress, you can tick each lesson after you complete it, and your score is saved when you finish a drill. Also, you can make a note of your questions and difficulties on the integrated notepad, and post your queries to me on the members-only forum.

At Spanish Bookworld you can find all the details of our subscription course, including free samples from the online lessons, podcasts, videocasts, kids’ lessons, interactive articles, ebook and exclusive forum.

At Spanish Bookworld you can also see free samples from our cd-rom, together with the cd-rom features, table of contents, system requirements, testimonial and more.