Spanish Language Software Reviews

Posts Tagged ‘business’

Benefits of Learning to Speak Spanish

Sunday, August 16th, 2009
by Huan Perez

It can be fun and easy to learn to speak Spanish but how fast you learn will depend on you. You can sign up for fast and easy Spanish lessons that are being offered online. You can also take classes with a good language school that can teach can monitor your progress and provide face-to-face tutorials.

To learn to speak Spanish fast, you must be dedicated to it. Whether or not you are enrolled in class or learning at home won’t matter if you do not take your lessons seriously and if you don’t practice. The adage ‘Practice makes Perfect’ is true for learning any new skill including speaking a new language.

If you learn to speak Spanish, you can offer translation services to hundreds of online web entities. With increasing sales being a critical business goal for anyone doing business, the ability to reach a new audience with their message has become one method of increasing sales.

There will also be workbooks and assignments that you can do to practice writing and reading in Spanish. To get better at it, you can practice reading using children’s books and other simple materials. After you have learned enough words, you can move on to ore difficult reading materials.

You could also become an invaluable employee of your current company by learning to speak Spanish. You are already functioning in your job very well. Your employer has invested money and time in you by training you and retaining your services as is. By learning to speak Spanish and applying your new skills at your current job, you win and your company wins.

The company benefits because they do not need to spend the time or money to hire a new bi-lingual person and train them in company functions. You already have the knowledge of the job, and can easily apply it with your new found skill. The company also benefits from being able to offer Spanish language services because you took the time to acquire those skills. Learn to speak Spanish and increase your income at the job you already have. It is a win-win situation for all.

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Improve Your Spanish Pronunciation - Getting the Rhythm

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009
by Martha Benitez

You have decided that you are going to learn Spanish and that is a very commendable task but you still need to learn to speak it well. It is such a joy when you speak to someone who has learned a foreign language and can speak it well. The first thing you think is that person has learned well, and worked hard at practicing speaking the language. You do not necessarily think that this person is smarter because they can speak the language so much better than other people. It is not a matter of intelligence but rather the fact that they worked hard at this task and became a good speaker.

If you want your speech to sound as natural and intelligible as possible, the rhythm of your speech can be just as important as, say, the quality of individual vowels. As an illustration of the importance of rhythm in speech, think in English about how you’d differentiate a ‘lighthouse keeper’ from a ‘light housekeeper’. In this article, I’ll outline two important elements of rhythm and how they work in Spanish: syllabification and stress. Syllabification is the process of organising the sounds of a word or utterance into syllables, and can differ a little from language to language. Informally, when we clap a word or phrase, we clap once to each syllable.

Syllabification: a key to giving your Spanish a more natural rhythm is to understand a process called diphthongisation: that is, making two vowels share a single syllable. Whenever you see a ‘i’ or ‘u’ vowel next to another vowel in Spanish, you need to think about diphthongisation.

There are many websites that can help you to learn such as Latin Chat. The website can help you to master the basics of Spanish while having fun. It may be a challenge but after just a few lessons, you should be able to have meaningful conversations with others. Tutors can be found in almost any city in the US today.

When learning a second language, it is imperative that you know how the word comes out of ones mouth. You can also tell how their tongue accentuates the word. In the Spanish language, Latin speakers talk with their tongue right behind their teeth. This is what helps give their words a much more crisper sound then that of English words. In English, our tongue tends to stay in the back of our throat and that is why it is hard for most North Americans to speak the language spoken in Central and South America.

So in careful speech, ‘poeta ingls’ (”English poet”) would be syllabified ‘po.e.ta.ing.ls’, in five syllables, but in normal, relaxed speech would tend to be ‘poe.taing.ls’; ‘come y toma’ (”eat and drink”) would be ‘co.mei.to.ma’; ‘mi amigo’ would be ‘mia.mi.go’ etc. The word ‘zanahoria’ (”carrot”) is often pronounced as three syllables, ‘za.na(h)o.ria’: as mentioned before, the ‘h’ isn’t pronounced and doesn’t affect syllabification.

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