Not progressing well with SpanishDict. Need support
Hi,
Not very happy to post that I am at a stage now where I don't understand how to proceed further with learning Spanish Language. When I started off the lessons it was going great especially the first few lessons teaching how to introduces yourself and basic stuff.
After that I have gone through various flashcards and ppt's but problem is it does not teach much about how to use these words in your daily conversation. One cannot simply join the words to make a sentence. Indvidual words may be correct but sentence as a whole has horrible meaning sometimes.
I am not saying that this is not a good forum to learn Spanish but maybe I am not using it in best manner. Request you to share if there is some flow to learn using this website.
It would be great if someone from you wonderful ppl can help me out.
Regards,
Rajinder S
5 Answers
I had this problem early on and I am sure that we all hit this " brick wall " at times .
My antidote has been to stop and reappraise all that I do know , rather than
concentrate on that which I perceive to be my weakness. Go back to day one ,
do the lessons again , and you will be amazed at how much you have learned and
the progress that you have made in such a short while . Now double your effort
and try for small victories , make your goals only a small distance away , ones
that are easily achievable , you may find that the pinnacle ,which is to speak Spanish
will quietly creep up on you , but the prize is a shy trophy do not gaze directly at it
or it will disappear , just stare down your tiny goals. Buena suerte amigo/a. 
My advice would be to go to this forum every day and participate in the word of the day threads.
You will build your vocabulary and get practice making sentences. Circle back and you will find that others have suggested corrections to any mistakes you may have made.
Read other people's posts and you will see how that word is used in other sentences. That will build your vocabulary and grammar skills even further.
If you do this every day, you will get better.
It may also help you to make friends with a native Spanish speaking person to "tune your ear" and practice pronunciation and your conversational Spanish. Do this early in your learning process and you will get over the initial shyness that comes with learning a new language.
Word of the Day and Palabra del día have also been helpful to me. At first, I felt like I was changing nearly every word in the sentence to fix it. But it's nice to have patient corrections by some other SD friends along the way. I still make a lot of mistakes but I can see that I am much better than 2 years ago. Start with very simple sentences and go from there. After corrections of other member's posts, read their corrected sentences out loud, checking with the English translation along the way to build word order and vocabulary.
One of the most helpful things I did, was to memorize some basic verbs and lots of them. Then I worked to be able to say the most common ones in simple past, simple present and simple future using 'ir + a". Getting some verbs and nouns down pat can really help give you the building blocks you need.
Try to remember the steps you used to get to an advanced level in English... If you can learn English, you can learn Spanish since Spanish sticks to the rules more than English. You are doing the hard task of learning a 3rd language (at least) through a 2nd language.... now how many people in this wide world can do that????
Links to games
Unit to Unit grammar study - very thorough... go through that, and try out Notes In Spanish to hear some spoken Spanish.
Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions..I have definitely got way to move ahead!!
Rajinder S
