Best tools to self-study Spanish? | Specific language questions | Forum

http://www.studyspanish.com/

http://wordreference.com/

The former has a couple lessons and explains differences between various concepts, and explains how to use various conjugations, etc..

The latter is a dictionary for English – Spanish and Spanish – English (It also does maaaany other languages including Arabic, Japanese, German, Russian, and many others) I like wordreference.com because you can also put the pluralized form of a noun/adjective, or even a conjugated verb and it'll tell you the base form, and in the case of a conjugated verb, it'll even tell you what tense/mood/subject it is. (e.g. if you put 'va' it'll tell you that it is the 2nd person subject of "ir", to go) and it also has a conjugater.

My advice is this: do NOT worry about learning all of the conjugations at one time! Don't bother learning all the grammar in one sitting, and I imagine it's the conjugations that are really hurting. When memorizing the verb tenses I like to memorize the present(presente), the preterit(preterito), etc.

Though I would find a language exchange here on this forum. (Or on a language exchange finding site like http://livemocha.com/ and "go off the deep end." learn simple grammar, practice with a native speaker who's a little patient. (Spoiler: they usually are a little patient if they know you're learning) Have him/her correct your errors in speech, this worked a lot better for me in having my conjugations memorized than with a method like Anki.

And in conversation, don't know a word? Use wordreference. He/she used a noun you don't know? Benny reccomends something that's fascinating is to go to the Spanish Google Image search engine: http://www.google.es/imghp and type in the noun they used. 

EDIT: Another dictionary I like to use sometimes is Real Academia Española's(RAE) monolingual Spanish dictionary: http://www.rae.es/rae.html less of your native language, more of the target(Spanish) Sadly, I do not know of many other instructional materials, but I felt the need to reccomend alternatives as they may be of interest. 

EDIT 2: http://www.youtube.com/user/languagenow I've used his Spanish videos in the past, compared to many other videos, his are the only ones that don't annoy me for learning Spanish

Bueno, so about school vs. independent study?  Schools are fine but with several key problems:

1. a.     They all claim to be a good school which is not true. Some are and some are not and there is no really effective way to tell the difference.  One thing they do all have in common though is that they are all expensive and time consuming.

1. b.    There is an inherent conflict of interest in that the school you attend makes more money the longer it takes you to learn.  The faster you learn; the less money for the school.

1. c.     The academic approach contains too much grammar and gives equal weight to all subject matter.  You will need some grammar and you should study subject matter in the order of its usefulness for communicating with other. I.e. 20% of the language is used 80% of the time so why not concentrate (at least initially) on the 20%.

1. d.    And the obvious problem with schools is… well …. You have to go to school. And we all know how much fun that was.  Si o No? 

So, if you know how, you will learn more on the street than you will in the class and it will make a world of difference in the quality of your Spanish.  Along the way I think you will also realize that interacting with Spanish speakers is a much more interesting way to learn as well as being much more effective.