The Importance of Physical and Online Materials
In the second entry on Spanish study methods, we looked at books. This third entry will focus on the importance of a dictionary, and we can’t stress enough the importance of it! Don’t buy one of those micro dictionaries unless you want to really fit it in your pocket. They are about as useless as they look. The advantage of a big dictionary is that there are expressions and idioms contained within, and for those who get good at Spanish, you may want to someday know the origin of certain words (which also helps with the skill of figuring out what words are without even looking at the dictionary!). You might want to see what a good bilingual Spanish dictionary looks like:
How to Study Spanish
Nothing beats the human mind for translation…at the present.
If you don’t want a paper dictionary, then find an online one. Word Reference Forums is excellent, and I much prefer it to any other non-human translation service! Why don’t non human translators work?
So how to study Spanish using Word Reference forums? Type in the word and the dictionary will open up. This is a great dictionary for single words, but what if you want something a bit more complicated? Type in a phrase and go to the bottom. No you’re at the ‘forum’ section of the site. This is a busy website and there are thousands of threads responding to questions regarding translation. You can almost be certain that if you’ve thought of a sentence, someone else has too. There is so much information, that there might be several threads on one expression. Open them all up and read the discussions. With the quantity of discussions going on about all sorts of everyday expressions, you can be sure to find the expressions you’re looking for. The only things this website tends not to pick up are very obscure expressions….but even then it’s quite good. Word Reference forums is the next best thing to a human translator, because you are effectively reading what people have written as opposed to a computer’s interpretation. If that doesn’t take your fancy and you’re filthy rich, you could also hire a full-time personal human translator.
Our final words on the materials involves looking at some of the fun types of things you can incorporate into a study program.