What Level is Your Spanish

What do I need to learn?
Are you a beginner, quite fluent or somewhere in between? Here is a technique you can use to determine your current level of Spanish and use that information to to help yourself improve.

Rate Your Spanish
One important standard is the ILR scale developed by the US Foreign Service. It has five levels:

* Level 1 - Elementary proficiency
* Level 2 - Limited working proficiency
* Level 3 - Professional working proficiency
* Level 4 - Full professional proficiency
* Level 5 - Native or bilingual proficiency

To see details of the five classifications, you can check out the Wikipedia article on the ILR scale.
While you read them make a note of what you can and cannot do.

Build Spanish Facial Muscles With a Comic Strip

Reading aloud gives us a different set of benefits from silent reading for gist. Silent reading only exercises our minds. Speaking aloud is a physical process. When we were children trying to say mama or dada can I borrow fifty bucks and the car keys, we heard what we were saying. This process provides the necessary feedback loop through our ears to help us judge how closely what we say matches what we hear around us. In learning Spanish we need to develop a slightly different combination of muscles in our cheeks, lips, tongue and throat in order to reproduce Spanish sounds.

Ready to exercise?

Step 1. Read a few Spanish comic strips and pick one with a moderate amount of dialogue.

Step 2. Read the strip out loud several times.

Step 3. Read the strip out loud in funny voices with funny facial expressions. Go nuts! This trick forces you to use and strengthen a range of muscles you don't use in your normal voice. It will also make you laugh along with everyone else in the library.


Now have fun learning Spanish with comic strips.