Monday 18 November 2013

Goodbye Paralee, Hello Fluencia

You'll often see references in this Blog to www.spanishdict.com .
It's a site I use regularly, for the online dictionary, the translator, and the verb conjugation charts.
When I was beginning to speak Spanish, I also downloaded a whole series of videos from the site, recorded by an enthusiastic young teacher called Paralee Whitmire.
Now it look s as if SpanishDict have sacked poor Paralee, in favour of their new teaching venture, Fluencia (www.fluencia.com)
Don't worry if you're still working through Paralee's lessons, though. You can still find them at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL18DCAA11F203EE63

So, Fluencia. I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed that SpanishDict's free offering has been supplanted by a paid-for service, but I'm quite impressed with the quality of the content.
For $14.95 per month, reducing to $6.95 a month, if you sign up for two years, you have access to some high quality audio, recorded by Spanish speakers, with quite a wide selection of subjects, situations and vocabulary.
Even better, you can sign up for free and try a number of free lessons (I think it was fifteen, but I can't exactly remember)

The lessons generally start with a conversation, with the speech typed out in Spanish, to aid recognition.
The you follow on with a number of different exercises including:
Hear and see a new word, and type it yourself.
Pick the correct word from a selection of pictures, labelled in English.
See a picture, and the word in English, then type it in Spanish.
Create a sentence from jumbled words, to match a picture labelled in English.
Type what you hear, in Spanish.
Translate written English into Spanish.
Lessons will last 20-30 minutes.

My recommendation is that you sign up and try the trial lessons for yourself.
There are 5 levels of difficulty to choose from.
This kind of learning doesn't suit everyone, and lacks the verbal interaction, and practical construction of sentences found in, say the Pimsleur, or Michel Thomas courses, which are audio-based, but the use of illustrations can be a big help for some learners.

That does, however bring me to one of my two minor gripes. In one exercise, the adjective being taught was 'cómodo' - comfortable.
In the quiz, a picture of a reclining woman was shown, but the program accepted 'cómodo', even though it should have been 'cómoda'
Speaking of which, you don't lose marks for missing accents - whether that's a good or bad thing, you can decide for yourself.
On the other hand, the program is clever enough to accept verbs with or without pronouns e.g. 'soy de méxico' OR 'YO soy de méxico'

The only other gripe is that, just occasionally, the recording of the native-speaker appears to be missing, and is replaced by a rather robotic synthesised text-to-speech.

Finally, as you'd expect from a program priced in dollars, it seems to be aimed at South American Spanish.
I did not see any reference to the 'vosotros' form used in Spain, and the audio lacked the 'siseo', or lisping of the letter 'c' before vowels, as in Barcelona.

All in all, the amount of free content should give you more than enough experience to decide whether you want to pay for a subscription, and you can' really say fairer than that.

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