Do you crave adventure? Do you want to meet fun people who are happy to talk to you and hang out with you? Do you want opportunities? Do you love upbeat music and delicious food? Then Spanish is the answer. Don’t just take my word for it here is the video from our adventures to Latin America where we got to experience all of these things.

How are you going to learn?

Duo Lingo – by far one of the greatest language learning apps on the planet, a great place to start and I wish it was available when I first started learning Spanish. Duo allows you to set your daily goals and will give you reminders that it is time to study. The app allows you to do all the things necessary to learn a language including listening, speaking, reading and writing practice.

italki – With italki you can either organise a professional teacher, a community tutor or a language exchange partner for yourself. The professional teachers cost a little more than the community tutors and the language exchange partners are free. If you are using a professional teacher or a community tutor, italki takes care of the time differences, the scheduling and the payment once you have completed your lesson. I would recommend signing up and talking as soon as possible, even if you give yourself a script to start with. As Benny Lewis says the sooner you can get talking the faster you will learn.

Easy Languages is a fantastic Youtube channel where people from all over the world take creative control of the content and walk around their respective cities interviewing residents about various subjects in their native language. This is a great way to get some authentic language exposure; the videos are usually quite short and fast passed.

Hugo Spanish Texts – Finally a great text book and CD set that will help to fill in all of those extra little questions that you will have when learning the language. Hugo Spanish is a great resource that is packed full of useful tips and language points that will really hammer the language home. If you can get a hold of the Hugo complete set this will take you all the way from zero to hero.

Anki is spaced repetition flashcard software where you spend your time learning the words and phrases that you don’t know rather than reviewing things that you are familiar with. I have been loading my own flash cards into the app and recording my own audio, this way I can control the volume of information going into it so as to avoid becoming overwhelmed.

The main thing to remember that learning a language takes time, I have seen an athlete work hard at it, and by hard I mean practicing everyday for a good couple of hours a day, and it still took him two years to get to a level where he could have a good conversation on a wide variety of topics and was able to navigate his way through South America relying on his Spanish. The most important concept is to get started and keep going. I believe that you can do it!!