Tip 3. Learning Spanish by Talking to Distant Invisible People

With long distance telephone services like Yak charging only 5 to 10 cents a minute, you can speak Spanish with anybody you like.

Try an activity like one of these. You might spend 35 cents a call.

Call up a green grocer in Little Havana in Miami and ask how the weather is or what's on special today.

Call the Colon Opera House in Buenos Aires (Do the online tour first then call to ask how the renovations are going.)

Try calling the Mayor of Mexico City's Secretary about whatever you like. Who knows, if you call during lunch, the Mayor might pick up your call himself. (His name is Marcelo Ebrard; he's very nice).

The point is, of course, that the world is full of people who would love to talk to us and we now have the means to do just that.

Tip 2. Learning Spanish by Talking to Yourself

4 Tips on Learning Spanish Every Day.

Often we would like to speak Spanish but there is nobody readily available to talk to. We can take opportunities to speak Spanish aloud to ourselves while doing our daily tasks.

Today's tip:

Tip 2. Huevos Rancheros ll: Where is my egg shampoo?

Talk to yourself in Spanish while you're in front of the bathroom mirror or in the shower.

After my first year of university in Canada, I tried learning Spanish in Mexico City and lived in a pension just down the street from the Canadian Embassy a.k.a. my mail drop. One of the teachers suggested I might try taping labels in the bathroom to reinforce my tiny vocabulary while I talked to myself about brushing things. I taped labels in the bathroom and while I was on a roll, I taped notes to everything else in my quarters.

I was happy with this technique until I arrived home from class one afternoon and heard a lot of giggling in my room. I went in and found one of the housekeepers giving a guided tour of my labels to a few of her coworkers. This is a bed, and here is a chair and over there is a floor, yes a floor...giggle, giggle giggle...you get the picture. To this day I have mixed feelings about the labels but I still use the the talking-to- myself-aloud part.

How to Get the Most Out of Reading Picture Books

Amerigo's First Law of Reading for Fun: Lose the Dictionary.

By show of hands. Who loves picture books? How many like comic books like Condor and Mafalda; or the classic picture books like Tintin and Asterix? They are a boon to learning Spanish.

Why lose the dictionary?

When we read in our first language we never read word-for-word; we always read by gist. Even when the reading is a tough slog we still do not read every word and we rarely look up anything unless we need to for academic or technical precision.

Why do we think we have to look up every single word in a Spanish article? We don't. When learning Spanish, gist reading is equally important but more difficult to allow ourselves to do. Perhaps we feel guilty or lazy. In school when we didn't know a particular word, we were told to look it up in the dictionary. Those pesky teachers' voices are difficult to dislodge from our memories. They should have told us just to carry on and we would figure it out all in good of time.

When we read without a Spanish/English dictionary we are not being lazy. We are gaining a lot more information and understanding than we give ourselves credit for. Without the looming spectre of the dictionary, we can focus instead on the situations and characters in the graphics. Learning Spanish with picture books can be a lot more fun.

So here's something to tell those pesky voices from the past. Silence. I lost my dictionary.