About me |
About 3 years ago I wanted to use the time I spent commuting to work to learn another language. I borrowed some audio programs from my local library, hopefully popped in the CDs in my car and hit Play.
Now, maybe it's just me, but I found them boring, too boring. After listening for just a little while, I would be feeling sleepy which didn't help my driving and worse, it was too much work. I was already working 9 hours a day, I didn't feel like turning my hour-commute each way into still more work.
And then one day a thought came to me on my drive. I liked listening to audiobooks on the drive, true or fictional stories, both made my drive a lot of fun. Could there be a way of combining learning a language with hearing a story. What if the story was told with each sentence said, first in the language you know, then in the language you don't know. Would you mind link the two? Just as one line in a song gets linked to the next in your mind without you even trying to learn the words.
It was probably the biggest hunch I've ever played. I decided that to try it out, I would hire someone to translate and record a story that I had written, Poster Girl, in this format in Spanish. Since I knew absolutely no Spanish, I would know that whatever I learned, I learned from these stories. The reader of Poster Girl, Michelle Thorson sent me a recording of the first few paragraphs of the story very early. She just wanted to be sure that I was okay with her reading style and that she had understood this unconventional format properly. Well I listened to that very first recording of what would become a No-Work Spanish audiobook and I got very excited. I could tell I was picking up words, learning Spanish, with every listening of it.
Here's the rest of the story of my learning Spanish, starting No-Work Spanish, as well as a special offer if you are interested. |
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A bit about the Spanish listening comprehension tests that I've created.
First, the source of my information (in case you question any of it) is: A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish: Core Vocabulary for Learners
About a year after I created the first set of No-Work Spanish audiobooks, I read an interesting statistic. It said that if you take the 1000 most frequently used words in a language, those words make up approximately 85-90% of the words spoken in normal, every day conversations.
This statistic astounded me. So if you understand 1000 words, then you could understand the vast majority of what is said. One thousand words! That's not very many at all, is it?
As soon as I heard it, I vowed to make sure the first five No-Work Spanish learn Spanish audio CDs (and MP3s) contained all 1000 words that are most frequently used in Spanish.
But what does this have to do with these Spanish listening comprehension tests/quizzes?
Each quiz is organized to ask you questions based on how frequently a word is used in Spanish. So the "First 100 Spanish words" quiz includes words that are among the 100 most frequently used words in Spanish.
Each quiz pulls 10 questions from a bank of 30+ questions, so you can retake the quiz and not receive exactly the same questions. So you will receive some repeats and if you retake the quiz even 3 or 4 times, you might get 10 questions where you had answered all the questions at least once before. Perhaps you will feel slightly less satisfaction answering questions properly when you have had them in a prior quiz, but if you have learned those words, then does it really matter whether you learned them in your original activities to learn Spanish, or in taking these tests?
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My links |
Learn Spanish with No-Work Spanish's unconventional method
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| Available CD's and MP3's to learn Spanish
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