Question about Learning Spanish

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Clarissa

November 1, 2024

Maybe other readers will be more helpful on this subject because I don’t use textbooks. We have an official textbook that is called Viva, if I’m not mistaken, but I never as much as opened it. I teach with my own original materials and I tailor them to every group, remaking the course anew every time. I explain the grammar myself without any texts. I had a very talented grammarian teach me Spanish grammar and I can explain any tense or mood in such uncomplicated, easy way that you get it immediately. The grammarian in talking about actually taught me preterite / imperfect in 2 words and the entire subjunctive in one sentence. I never made a mistake since.

I never used any textbooks myself to learn either.

If anybody has good recommendations, please share because I’m useless.

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2 responses to “Question about Learning Spanish”

cliff arroyo

November 2, 2024

“I never used any textbooks myself to learn either.”

I’ll just add that the textbook depends a lot on the learner….

You were already multilingual when you began learning Spanish (including French?) and that probably facilitated things to a large degree.

A monolingual English speaker is going to need more guidance. My first Spanish classes were in an adult education type set up. First year was the beginning of a standard textbook type thing and the second were materials selected by the teacher and the subjunctive took up most of the second year grammar.

One of the things that helped me most, weirdly, was the introduction to a popular dictionary that had a section describing different countries’ usages.

There used to be a British series ‘Teach Yourself’ that had really great work-at-home grammar centered books, including lots of less commonly taught languages.

In the 1990s they reoriented into standard conversation based books and kind of suck…

But the older ‘version ‘Teach Yourself Spanish’ by N. Scarlyn Wilson was very good. Oriented toward peninsular usage.

That said I have no idea what’s out there now…

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1. Demotrash
  
  November 2, 2024
  
  A lot of those older textbooks are still available. There been be downsides, like outdated vocabulary, but as long as it’s not *too* old this problem isn’t too bad. If anyone wants to get in depth with this stuff, they should check out Alexander Arguelles. This man is passionate about language textbooks.
  
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