Learning Spanish is a wonderful thing. It opens up life opportunities you didn't know were there. Do you want new friends, to find love, get on in your job or just enjoy travel more? Learning another language can help, in fact, that's why most people do it.

So what's involved? I tried and failed many times (languages were my worst subject at school), but eventually I found something that worked, and I want to share that with you.

What they don't want you to know

There's an awful truth, though. Are you ready? Are you sitting down? OK, here goes. Learning a language takes time and, OMG, effort. Sorry folks, but that's the way it is. Forget the promises by people wanting to sell stuff, it takes time. You want to know how much time, right? You'd better be sitting down.

OK. Now this is something the language course sales people don't want you to know with their promises of learning Spanish in a weekend, so I guess I'll never make a salesman. Alright, that's enough stalling, here goes: If you want fluency, just between you and me, think in terms of a thousand hours. Oh yes. There .. I said it.

Now, you see, to me, that sounds fantastic: "you mean, if I put in, say, an hour a day, in a few months I'll be speaking Spanish and in 2-3 years I'll be COMPLETELY FLUENT? I get to meet new people, get promoted, appear interesting at parties. So .. all I've got to do is find an hour a day and that's in the bag? AND, this learning is fun, so I'll want to do it?" I mean to me that sounds like free jelly and ice cream. That's fantastic. Anyway, there's the truth for you, sorry about that. No, not the free ice cream thing, that wasn't truth. The other truth.

"How can you help me speak fluent Spanish?"

So let's see. I'm learning Spanish just like you. I'm not so very far ahead of you, so I can show you the good stuff and hopefully help you avoid the bad stuff. So in that spirit, I want to share my study method with you.

I've spent hours and hours looking at resources on the net. No not hours, weeks and weeks. Really. So there are some resources to look into, and I know something about what's designed to sell well versus what actually works.

I've created some free lessons with groovy exploratory linking magic in them so you can just kinda wander about and learn stuff. No, wait. FREE SPANISH LESSONS. There. I think that's clearer.

And there's something serious going on in the background too.

The serious thing that's 'going on' in the background

(the thing that will really help you learn Spanish)

You see, I can actually write software and what seems blatantly obvious to me is what we should learn first are the most common words. Right? So we'll start with Yes and No and whateverrrr, and end sometime never with 'grommet' and 'giraffe', stuff you really don't expect to use unless it's a really, really bad day.

In fact, someone made a serious study and decided that we can say everything we would normally need to say with under a thousand words. I guess for Silent Bob that might be a stressor, but that sounds like a plan to me. It took me a while to find that list, and when I did it was English only. I'm adding the Spanish now, go have a look at my 'learn spanish' site to see how far I've got.

I've also got a magic word prompting thing happening that I'll let loose on you soon that will help you learn the most common words, by setting up a situation where you have to recall them from scratch. No multiple choice nonsense .. this is training for real-life. It'll remember and relax about what you know and push harder on the stuff you don't. And you'll be able to get this on your commute on your phone, or at home, wherever. So that hour you're supposed to spend could sometimes be (perhaps partly) made up of snatched time through the day. And it'll be free. Well, mostly free.

If you want to be alerted to that when it comes out, take a look through my 'how to learn spanish' page. That walks you through the study method I use and gives you useful links. Sign up to the mailing list while you're there so I can let you know when this groovy Spanish vocabulary builder thingy comes out.

I think I'm outta steam. Maybe I'll add something more later :-)