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There is a service for Japanese (Or Chinese?) students that want to practice their English, they basically go into Skype conversations with people willing to do it in the USA. This people are usually paid a small fee for their time and they have no shortage of people available. I will venture a guess that you could arrange something similar but for people wanting to learn Spanish, and, as you probably know by now, Latin American are so open a friendly that I am sure that you will find some of them that would do it for free. You can transform it into a group experience using something like Google Hangouts where people could join and discuss various topics in Spanish so they can practice. If you have the know how and the resources, this could even be a nice business opportunity to tackle.

This is somehow of a politically charged debate, but the term "Castilian" is no longer in use. I went to Mallorca a few years ago on vacation, had no issues with people understanding my Spanish as I don't speak a word of Catalan, specially if you stick to the tourist areas, if anything, you are probably going to end up speaking a lot of German there since they get mostly German tourists, so much so that some pubs have Menus and Signs in German first. I don't know what you do for a living but I would suggest learning Spanish first, it opens you to all of Spain and all the Latin American countries, the difference between all the dialects is not that significant really, you can lear Spanish in Spain and have absolutely 0 problems understanding and communicating with people all over Latin America, and that's like 400 million people that now you are going to be able to talk to.

It is, watch Telenovelas or watch sitcoms or tv shows, even animated movies, that are dubbed over in Spanish. They have both a more neutral accent and they try to stay true to a more neutral language avoiding slang, try to watch the news too... but I feel you, to add confusion to the whole thing words for common items are different between countries, for instance you will find that the word for pop corn is different allover Latin America, some examples: "pochoclo", "crispetas", "cotufas", "palomitas de maiz","maiz tostado" are names for pop corns, funny thing is that if you use "palomitas de maiz" almost everybody is going to understand you because that's the name they use when dubbing over Spanish audio in movies. Nobody will ever say the thing out loud but they recognize it immediately. And don't get me started on words that are slang yet have complete different meanings on different places.

I am surprised nobody has mentioned the memorization of stuff as the hardest part of learning a language: the gender of a noun in languages that still have those, grammatical rules, all that stuff, not to mention irregular verbs conjugations, and, in the case of German, even the plural of nouns since those are weird. I don't have much trouble remembering the nouns themselves, but, at least for German, the gender is a big problem for me, and this is problematic since the gender of the nouns affects the inflections all over the sentence, it is a nightmare. All languages some have strict rules with a few exceptions, that would make everything so much easier.

It really depends on your teacher, my German instructor was not from Germany yet had a beautiful accent and I am sure that she could pass as a German while speaking over the phone to another German person. She actually recommended that I switched instructors once in a while so your ear is trained to hear slightly different accents and intonations. If you are learning Spanish, more reason to be exposed to all the different accents from all over Latin America and even the difference accents that exists inside Spain itself (they vary a lot). What you say is very interesting because I am aware of a very weird phenomenon, I have observed this many times: it is easier for 2 people to communicate using a language that is the second language to both than it is to communicate with a native speaker of said language. How weird is that? If you are learning Spanish another person learning Spanish is more likely to understand you that a native Spanish speaker.

Just a little piece of advice for everybody considering using songs as a way to practice their Spanish, please don't use reggaeton music , I have nothing against the genre the problem is that they use a Spanish that is completely broken, it is not even slang, I assume they actually invent words just to make sure the thing rhymes. I now, it is the cool thing right now but it will not work as a tool for practicing your language so if you like this urban style at least consider normal Spanish Hip Hop, they use complete sentences, a lot of interesting idioms and the vocabulary is extensive. I would recommend sticking to Pop and romantic ballads, if you like Shakira try to listen to some of her early Spanish records, try to translate those lyrics for practicing. You know, back in the day she was more of an Alanis Morissette type in her lyrics and overall image, and not this huge pop start that she is know, her lyrics were quite intimate and had some depth.

If anything, there is an excess of channels for learning German, some of them are good, but some of them are very disorganized and incomplete, I guess the people or person behind usually grow tired of the thing midway and decides to abandon it. YouTube is a great resource for learning although a lot of courses are not actually free, they just give you a few free lessons in YouTube to give you a taste of things and then point you to their pay walled site to continue, I ok with that, that's their prerogative but if I were to pay for lessons I think I would go a pay an instructor directly to attend a class. A cool channel is "Easy Languages", they feature interviews with people filmed on the street speaking several different languages, even arabic, check them out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqcBu0YyEJH4vfKR--97cng I guess this is more about being exposed to the language that you are studying and practicing than actual learning.

This subject is a little more complex than that. Even though anybody will eventually speak a language if they experience the so called "total immersion" for a while (believe me, you will speak any language in the world once you are in a foreign country, starving and having to order some food) there are several theories that try to explain language learning in children, one is the Chomsky's LAD or Language Acquisition Device as a theoretical part of the mind that allows kids to quickly learn a language since the grammar rules are, hypothetically, innate. I saw (online) a lecturer from Stanford U actually explaining that the part of the brain involved in learning your first language or mother tongue is actually different that the parts engaged when you go ahead and actually learn a second language. There appears to be something fundamentally different between learning a language as a child and learning it as an adult that goes beyond the plasticity of kids minds and their exposition to the language and actually involves different parts of the brain.

I guess this question is aimed towards people that have seriously studied a language for a while and are reasonably fluid with it. Do you ever find yourself dreaming in said language? I read somewhere that the two sings that you have completely mastered a language are: catching yourself thinking in the new language without even realizing that you were doing it and dreaming in this second language, as in, speaking and interacting with people in this second language. Is this true? I would like to know this from people that actually are fluid in several tongues, yet I know that the definition of "dreaming in a language" is probably fuzzy at best, you could dream that you were speaking say, Japanese, and the words made sense to you but you were actually just dreaming gibberish. I would like to hear from you if you experience this, specially after prolonged and intensive sessions with the new language.

I you are not driven by results I guess you will never accomplish anything. Research shows that the biggest motivation for people is not even money, is overcoming challenges. The best motivation for me was simply turning on the german internet radio, listening to the news a simply realizing that I was understanding everything. It was an amazing moment of realization. I guess that's the thing that should drive you, the results you are seeing or feeling. I guess the ultimate accomplishment is to actually go to a foreign country and speak the language with the locals, this is the ultimate reward in itself. I know that after I gave an online presentation to some clients using my second language I was ecstatic. This is the feeling that should drive you.

I don't want to sound too pedantic, but that is factually incorrect, the most common spoken language right now is, by far Chinese (All Mandarin branches) if you count native speakers, Spanish comes at second with half the speakers of Chinese. If you count by total number of speakers, that is, people that speak the language to some degree (as a second language) then English comes at first (not surprisingly) with over 2 billion speakers, and Spanish falls to the 5th place.

I know the world is full of languages and that you have more languages than nations, but do you really thing that 30 languages are not enough for an app to have? I think that it is reasonable enough, Besides from English, German, French, Spanish, Arabic, Mandarin, Italian, Russian and Japanese and perhaps Portuguese and Hindi I can't think of any other languages with enough traction or demand to justify an app, don't get me wrong, I would love to learn something like Rapa Nui, that would be a blast but at the same time I can't blame the developers if they decided to limit the languages to a few of the strong ones and focus on those instead of trying to be sort of a jack of all trades.

There is a bigger sin, I believe, and is something that I catch once in a while when I am reading translated text, this is not exactly a mistake but it certainly makes the final product less appealing: the literal translation of an idiom from one language to another. The correct way to do this, in my opinion, would be to use an equivalent idiom from the other language, because the literal thing makes no sense in the other language and actually comes across as weird! I see this a lot of times with movie subtitles as literally translations of novels are usually more "serious", almost more "academic" work if you will, but I've seen some terrible literal translation to Spanish subtitles while watching american sitcoms. If you are a professional translator, please, don't do this, don't take the literal route and find an equivalent idiom, this is exactly what separates you from a machine, your knowledge of the slang and subtle idioms from both languages.

In terms of structure and conjugation of verbs it is a little closer to traditional Spanish than the Spanish dialect spoken in other countries. For what is worth, when English programs are dubbed over for the Latin American market they usually do it using Mexican voice actors. The Simpsons that is shown all over Latin America is dubbed in Mexico for example, and everybody is able to understand it. They always try to use a more neutral accent and they try to avoid many slang words. I once met a girl from Serbia that was able to learn to speak Spanish just by watching Mexican Telenovelas alone.

Actually, there is not a single Latin American Spanish. Colombian Spanish is a little different than say, Argentinian Spanish (actually called Rioplatense Spanish) as it uses the "voseo" form for the second person singular pronoun, that is, using "vos" instead of "tu" thus affecting the conjugational verb forms. To add a little more confusion to the mix "voseo" is actually used in some regions of Colombia! Some word from common household items and fruits are different, for instance, passion fruit has many different names depending on the country, and not even the Chileans themselves understand Chilean Spanish I you go to a country to learn the language you can pretty much go to any of them as all the dialects are mutually intelligible but the difference between Spanish from say, Spain, and Spanish from Perú is more significant than the difference between British and American English.

If you use the app across various devices will your progress be synchronized between all of them? I hope so since that could be a killer feature. I actually believe that Duolingo as an app for your phone is better, because then it is ubiquitous, you have your phone on you all the time I presume, so it should be easier to take it out and start practicing, you have fewer excuses since sitting at a computer to do something takes a little more effort, not to mention that you can use it while on the go or while traveling. I started using Duolingo (I don't use it anymore but that's another story) as a substitute for the silly iPhone games that I used to play, the idea was that I was wasting a lot of time using the device for trivial stuff so I decided that I may as well use it to learn something useful. I also can't help but wonder if the missing grammatical information is not actually a blessing as this forces you to learn from the context of the sentence, just like you learn a language in real life, basically by imitating what you hear and see. Kids don't learn grammatical rules until they learn how to speak first.

Last year Duolingo was getting rave reviews all over the place, it appears that all the fuzz went away. I, for once, would like to get to know a person that was actually able to speak the language that they were learning fluidly by using Duolingo alone, even working as a translator as that appeared to be the idea behind Duolingo's business model. I used it for a while, but I simply grew tired of it, the thing is that I don't know how much of it was my fault for not taking it seriously and how much was Duolingo's fault for not being engaging enough. In all honesty you could have intensive language classes with a certified instructor daily and if you don't make the effort to actually learn and practice you are going to be wasting your time, so I guess you can't blame the tool. but I believe the thing is not as popular as it was before, meaning that all those claims of people being fluid after a few months were fabricated or exaggerations.

It is my understanding that a good actor will transmit what's going on even if you watch a movie without sound. Well, if you think about it for a very long time movies lacked any sound and people went to the movies anyway. The fact that you were able to understand the things that were going on is more of a testament to the talent of the actors and the filmmakers. This is a visual medium after all and not everything is told by using exposition trough the dialog. I am pretty sure that if I were to hear something very dialog heavy like a court room drama in a foreign language there is no way for me to understand what's going on

If you find yourself trying to learn the language while living abroad one of the first things that you need to learn are numbers: Numbers are extremely important, if you need to take a train sometimes the platform that a train will use is announced over the speakers and if you need to give your address over the phone numbers are going to be needed, among many other things. So a nice trick to learn numbers is to watch lottery drawings, you are going to have the visual clues, they usually are going to call the numbers slowly and clearly. It is a very nice way to learn the numbers at least from 1 to 99. Give it a try if you are lucky enough to catch the drawing on television.

I am bilingual with a twist: I use one language for my professional life and all the interactions needed for that and then I speak a different language with my family and friends. I also consume media in one language almost exclusively except novels, I only read novels in the other language. It is funny how the switch that I flip to start working also means that I start talking, writing and even thinking in a different language.

I don't know... this sounds like an insane amount of work and the law of diminished returns will kick in eventually, if you focus on a single large novel the vocabulary and overall themes are going to be the same the whole time, I think it is better to translate shorter works but from different subjects and with different grammatical persons, so you are exposed to a broader spectrum of words. Translating song lyrics helped me a lot, specially if you like the song, for extra points try to translate the song and alter it enough no make it rhyme in the other language.

¡Por nada! Mis idiomas maternos son el inglés y el español. La oración está perfecta pero no debes cambiar el tratamiendo de "usted" a "tu". Si se empieza con el tratamiento de usted se debe terminar la frase de esa manera ( ¿Cuál es su idioma materno?) Great grammar, awesome vocabulary, just don't change from the formal treatment to an informal one right in the middle of a sentence.

YouTube. En YouTube encuentras una gran cantidad de contenido en español, seguramente algo que te interese. Conozco unos buenos canales con contenido interesante y buen lenguaje. Las reglas de copyright también son mas flexibles para el contenido en español asi que podrás conseguir muchos programas y películas. Por ejemplo, hay programas enteros de discusión sobre temas como fútbol. Eso te podría servir. No leas los comentarios, ahí no hay nada de valor. También hay telenovelas. Ese contenido es terrible pero mucha gente aprendió el idioma viendo telenovelas, porque el lenguaje es simple y accesible.

Think in terms of Your and You: This is your chair: Esta es tu silla. You are my hero: Tú eres mi héroe In theory, and probably in ancient Spanish this was true, the pronunciation was different, nowadays you simply add the accent to differentiate two words that look the same but have different meanings.

This is a much more complex topic. There are no rules, as in, grammatical rules determining whether you should use one or the other, this is a pure cultural thing and it is very different from country to country. For example, Colombians use the formal Usted almost all the time, even when talking with their own family. Here is how I determine the usage when I am talking in Spanish: If the person is older than me, I use the formal tone. How old? That depends, but usually 5 years or more if I can determine it. If the person is a figure of authority like a judge, a police officer I use the formal tone. You probably are also safer using the formal tone with your professors and teachers, and the person behind any counter. In almost any type of work or professional environments I use a formal tone. Germans are much more into this, in Spanish speaking countries the rules are more relaxed. If it is a child I use Tu, using Usted with a child looks weird and the child would be looking at you funny, unless you are his or her teacher Now, for more nuanced situations: You usually can't go wrong with Usted, as using the Tu may be seen as you taking to many liberties with a person that you just met, but, yet again, if you go with a formal tone you are also signaling that you want to put a distance between you and the other person. Just like in German, you have to learn both.