This week for my free inquiry I have been exploring different online resources that you can learn Spanish on. I have continued to use Duolingo which is a so far still the best resource I have found. Duolingo’s free version gives you much more than any of the other free versions. It was little hard for me to look into some other ones because they immediately required payment. I will now outline some of my findings:
Duolingo: Short classes (no more than 10 minutes each). Free version runs on hearts. Therefore, if you mess up several times it will require you to wait until your hearts are refilled. For the premium version that gives you unlimited hearts it is $10 a month. It makes your learning a fun game with leveling up, day streaks, and skill levels to keep you engaged. It is a very intuitive app that does not go fully into grammatical lessons. This is why it has been a nice app for reminding me as I have a background in Spanish already. It also is not specialized in Spanish therefore it runs standardized procedures for all of the languages it gives which means it does not go far in depth.
Memrise: This is a very good app for building a large vocabulary. It is similar style to Duolingo with games. It allows you variety and you can choose your course. A cool feature it has is teaching you different types of Spanish as it can differ wherever you are in the world. It is very similar to Duolingo too in that it does not go into grammatical explanations as it is not specialized in Spanish. It’s premium version costs $9 a month. I have downloaded this on my phone but still have yet to play around with it.
Busuu: This one allows you to gain a very solid foundation of Spanish grammar. It uses a large variety if pictures and audio. It creates levels for your learning and allows you to create your own learning plan. This asks you how much you hope to learn and how many times a week you will practice. It will then layout an extensive plan to help you accomplish this goal. The issue with this one is that it is $16 a month. It would be a great option but I am not wanting to commit to a full membership that is this much for this class.
As I continued through the other options they continued to look better and better but got pricey. Of all of these different resources I have just listed many of them do very well with the foundational spelling/grammar lessons but little to none of them are strong for conversational Spanish. I hope to someday take classes for Spanish again to learn or to eventually pay for one of the more expensive resources and commit fully. However, as a university student in a tech class for now I am not wanting to spend that when I know I will not be as committed to it with my other classes. So, as I continue I will be mainly working with Duolingo and Memrise. I will rebuild my vocabulary and basic phrases. When I go home for reading break I will try and dig out my old Spanish work books and see if these can assist in the grammatical lessons.
