Visual Link Spanish(TM) Newsletter - Volume 6 Issue 39

Current # of Subscribers: 199,182

This issue:
1. NEW - Cultural Spanish Recipes
2. Testimonial
3. Weekly Spanish Lesson - “Sentence Building II”
4. Words of the Week
5. Ask Dave Section - “Spain and Latin American Differences”
6. Culture Lesson - “Horse-n-Buggy Spanish of Old vs. Technology of
Today”
7. Responses to Past Newsletters

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conversational in 30 days or less guaranteed - or your money back.

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NEW! - Cultural Spanish Recipes
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We are excited to implement a cultural Spanish recipe section to our
newsletter. We welcome your tasty Spanish recipes including the
originating countries (if available), accompanying pictures where
possible without copyrights and any interesting notes or comments
about the recipe.

We appreciate this important cultural connection around the globe
celebrating the all-important food traditions of the Spanish-speaking
people.

Please email recipes and pictures to: mercedes@learnspanishtoday.com

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Visual Link Spanish(TM) Testimonial –
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I’m already halfway through the course! I love the set up of the
course the way it’s divided into sections. It is making it so much
easier for me to form sentences and remember the words. I’m amazed
that I am able to remember the words as I have memory problems and
can’t remember day to day things!

Anyway, thanks again for your help!

Kristina

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Weekly Spanish Lesson—Sentence Building II
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This week’s lesson comes from the complete Visual Link Spanish™
course. Click below for Part II of your fun, interactive lesson
Sentence Building Lessons.

To check it out, click here:
http://www.spanishprograms.com/learn/spanish_sentence.htm

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Words of the Week
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Taken from our complete CD-ROM course —–

Monday / I’m going to / (Yo) Voy a
Tuesday / He is going to / (El) Va a
Wednesday / She is going to / (Ella) Va a
Thursday / You are going to / (Usted) Va a
Friday / to practice / practicar
Saturday / the day after tomorrow / pasado mañana
Sunday / next week / semana

Click Here to login and access your free membership and lessons.
http://www.spanishprograms.com/login.phtml

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The Official “Ask Dave” Section —–
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Question

Dear Dave,

The last news letter made a big point of correct pronunciation being
of great importance, but we are going to Spain and there seems very
little emphasis on Spanish as the Spanish speak it. There are hints
on how Mexico differs to South America, but very little reference to
how Spanish people speak it. For example there is no mention of the
“th” for “ce..” or “ci..” words.

What else is there we should know?

Apparently (according to the CD) some parts of Spain lisp the “Z”,
but which parts?

If this likely to be such a big issue can you please help us out.!

Best wishes,

Peter

Answer

Hola Peter,

The main differences between Spain and Latin American pronunciation
are the “ce”, “ci”, “z” and “s”.

In Spain, the “ce”, “ci” and “z” all make the English “th” sound. For
example, the word “entonces” would actually be pronounced
“entonthes”. The word “cita” would be pronounced “thita” and the word
“zapatos” is pronounced “thapatos”.

The letter “s” in Spain is pronounced with a little different accent.
It has more of a hissing sound.

Those are the main differences in pronunciation between Latin America
and Spain.

As far as vocabulary goes, there are a few differences similar to the
difference between words in England, the U.S. and Australia.

Our course has carefully chosen the words that are most universal no
matter where you go. There are a few rare exceptions where words that
may be a little more region specific, however, in general we have
tried to choose vocabulary that will work in every country.

Hopefully that answers your question,

Dave

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Culture —– Horse-n-Buggy Spanish of Old vs. Technology of Today
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I’d like to start off this week’s newsletter by saluting all of the
public-school Spanish teachers of today. You are so dedicated and do
such wonderful work usually on a shoe-string budget. Many of you use
so much energy while teaching, and put on “performances” each day for
your students to get them to learn Spanish. You do great work and
should be commended!!

If our teachers are so great, why do so many students finish Spanish
classes without being able to converse in Spanish? That is the issue
I want to address in this week’s newsletter.

In my opinion, one of the major problems with learning Spanish today
is that the resources available for people and school classes to
learn Spanish are over 100 years old — the manual and the workbook.
The same horse-n-buggy approach of 100 years ago is still used today,
with an occasional low-budget CD.

Another problem is that most of the textbooks available are designed
to teach students how to be Spanish teachers and not how to speak and
converse in Spanish. In other words, when students finish a course,
they have a lot of grammar rules memorized and can regurgitate them
and even conjugate different verbs but can’t actually communicate in
Spanish.

What does this do to the average person? The problem is that most
students that finish taking Spanish classes have the idea that
Spanish is very difficult because of all of the rules and
conjugations. Many of you have probably built mental blocks against
learning Spanish because when you finished Spanish at school, you
couldn’t speak it and much less with a native speaker. So many people
I talk to think that they were just not “made” to speak Spanish. They
also think that they were the only ones that didn’t get much out of
Spanish in school. If you feel this way, don’t worry, you’re not
alone, a majority of people that take Spanish in school feel the same
way.

Is there hope? Don’t worry, you’re not less intelligent or lacking a
“Spanish gene”; in school you were simply trained to memorize grammar
rules and verb conjugations but not to speak Spanish! Whew! I can
already feel a sigh of relief from many of you who thought you were
sub par or damaged intellectually for the rest of your lives because
of your experience with Spanish. Think of all of the wasted worries
you could’ve put to rest had you known that you were simply learning
with the wrong methods!

In my opinion, textbooks, even current “up-to-date” ones generally
teach you Spanish backwards. Within the first few months of class,
you learn numbers, colors, days of the week and many verb
conjugations. Then the real hope is that you’ll later pick up
conversational skills.

That is why we at Visual Link Spanish™ have done nine years of
research and development to create our courses with modern technology
and in a format that actually works. We teach you Spanish like
children learn their own language but tailored to adults. First, you
learn vocabulary words with computer pictures. It is done in a way
that stimulates the brain and teaches you to build sentences. You
also learn conversational skills like asking and answering questions.
We don’t teach you in-depth grammar at first just like children don’t
have grammar lessons when first learning a language. However, you do
learn to speak and converse correctly with correct grammar!

When we took English in our later school years, we finally started
learning grammar rules. But most of us don’t even remember the
grammar rules we learned in school. Does that make us less effective
English speakers? NO! The fact that we don’t remember what a
prepositional phrase is or the past participle of the word “swim”
doesn’t mean we can speak English correctly.

In learning Spanish, there is a little difference however. Verb
conjugations are a major part of advanced Spanish. They do have to be
learned and practiced to achieve an advance level of Spanish. As you
are probably aware, Visual Link Spanish™ Level I is available for the
beginning student which takes you from a beginning to an intermediate
level and gets you conversational. We also have our Level II verb
course that is similar in style to our Level I course but teaches you
the ins and outs of verb conjugation. I have lived in foreign
countries and taught Spanish personally for three years at the
university level and have never seen anything as complete as our
course will be for teaching verb conjugations.

Moral of the Story: Our goal and passion here at Visual Link
Spanish™/U.S. Institute of Languages® is to help you learn Spanish
using the most modern and technologically advanced methods so when
you are finished, you can actually speak Spanish. We are not like
many companies who just throw together a Spanish course to make money
at your expense and you gain nothing from it. We’ve had many
customers say they’ve wasted hundreds of dollars trying to learn
Spanish, and finally with our course they were able to learn and
communicate in Spanish.

Responses for next week: Please write us and tell us about your
experience learning Spanish in school as well as with our Visual Link
Spanish™ course.

Sneak peek at next week: “El correo - the Latin American Post Office
and Bank Syndrome”

¡Hasta luego! (”Until later”)

David S. Clark — President / Director
Visual Link Spanish(TM)
Fun, Interactive Spanish Courses
http://www.spanishprograms.com
dave_c@spanishprograms.com

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Responses to Past Newsletters
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Response #1

In spite of what you say is the sound generated by dogs the most
common sound I hear generated by them in the middle of the night is
“¡Cállese, usted maldijo perros!” but it usually has an english
accent because native spanish speakers never, ever hear their dogs
barking.

Response #2

The other side of the question is: In what language do animal hear? I
live in Mexico with a native-born cat. One day while having friends
for comida a ten year old heard me talking to Brindlito (my cat´s
Spanglish name!) in English and said to his mom, “Cats understand
English?” I tell people that he is bilingual: he doesn´t pay
attention to me in either language. Food and the squirt bottle are
our common language!

Thanks for a fun colunm.

Linda en México

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