Why use a phrasebook?

(Español)

1. The language and vocabulary are extremely practical, so there is a chance that I will actually use the stuff I memorise.

2. There is a lot of vocabulary. A problem faced by all language learners is that you need a lot of vocabulary to participate in basic conversations. Many language courses only use 400 words or so.

My Phrasebook

I’m using the McGraw-Hill Spanish All-in-One kit ( ISBN-10: 0071627669 , ISBN-13: 978-0071627665).

It has 300 basic phrases, the conjugations for 30 verbs and around 900 different words to learn.

It has audio recordings by a native speaker of all the phrases.

This is very important because I do not want to memorize the phrases perfectly only to pronounce them incorrectly.

I especially like it because the individual phrases are recorded as separate mp3 files, which makes adding the phrases to my Anki cards easy.

I don’t have any affiliation with McGraw-Hill or anyone involved with this book.  I was going to use McGraw-Hill’s iSpeak Spanish, but it seems to be out of print.  The Spanish All-in-One kit seems to be an updated version of iSpeak Spanish.

Progress Report
I successfully memorised 70 phrases this week . I didn’t get time to memorise 10 on Saturday, so I made up for it by memorising 20 on Sunday.

Entiendo un poco de español (I understand a little Spanish).

The phrases I will learn today are…

I want to speak Spanish

I can’t speak Spanish.  At all.  But I want to.

I don’t live in a Spanish-speaking country, and I don’t have the time or money to try the immersion experience.

So I want to find out if I can learn Spanish by memorising a phrasebook.

I will use Anki to learn 10 Spanish phrases a day.

My phrasebook has 1500 phrases, so it should take me 150 days, or five months.

I will start today.

The first 10 phrases in my phrasebook are:

I will report on my progress once a week.