Learn Spanish Easily at Home

To be able to learn Spanish easily at home is the dream of many language students. And today it is certainly achievable. There are programs to fit almost everyone's budget, learning style and lifestyle. There are online courses, MP3 audio courses, courses on cassettes, multimedia courses on DVD and CDs, as well as the more traditional classroom courses.

If you are a visual learner there are the interactive Rosetta Stone Spanish courses which use a large amount of language with picture associations in the program. Rosetta Stone also includes instruction in speaking, reading, and writing Spanish so it is well balanced in its approach. The downside of Rosetta Stone is slow to get into actual conversational Spanish. And also, it is quite expensive if you go for all three levels.

Other programs that allow a little more flexibility include the excellent Rocket Spanish program developed by the Chilean, Mauricio Evlampieff. Mauricio found, to his disappointment, that most formal high school and college Spanish courses, as well as many of the self study programs, taught an outdated academic form of Spanish, not the Spanish spoken by native speakers today.

Mauricio created a course that includes multiple modules for reading, writing, and speaking Spanish and even includes a few Spanish language learning games. The program is downloadable from the Internet for immediate access, or you can have it shipped on CDs directly to your door for an additional sum. If you are economy minded, go for the downloadable version. It is about a third of the cost of the shipped CD version.

Another excellent basic level Spanish language course is Patrick Jackson's Learning Spanish Like Crazy. Patrick, who is not a native speaker of Spanish, was frustrated to discover that the Spanish he was learning through the then existing language programs was not the Spanish that he was experiencing on the streets of Latin America.

After becoming fluent in Spanish himself while living in South America, he set out to correct this deficiency in the available Spanish language learning program options. Like Rocket Spanish, Learning Spanish Like Crazy is conversational Spanish focused and also immediately downloadable from the Internet or for an additional cost, you can have it shipped to you on CDs.

Being economy minded myself, I would definitely opt for the downloadable versions of both Rocket Spanish and Learning Spanish Like Crazy. If you have a CD burner on a home computer, you can burn the downloaded files onto CDs yourself much cheaper than purchasing them on CDs. However, if you have an iPod or MP3 player, you can load the audio files onto them and take your Spanish language lessons with you, wherever you go.

Over the years I have tried at least a dozen or more Spanish language learning programs, but the three discussed here are by far the best I have found for learning Spanish on your own. If you want to learn Spanish quickly, I would combine either Rocket Spanish or Learning Spanish Like Crazy with Rosetta Stone as they complement each other quite well. You can use Rosetta Stone on your computer while at home and the audio lessons from one of the other programs while driving in your car, jogging, walking, or riding the train or bus during your daily commute.