If you’re just looking for my lesson notes on Pimsleur Spanish I, you can directly download the PDF here.
I love languages. I love listening to people speaking in different languages. But more than that, I love learning them. While I believe the best way to learn a language is to surround yourself with native speakers, most of us aren’t blessed with a multilingual circle of friends, or simply don’t have people around that speak the language we want to learn.
Signing up for language classes is one alternative but not always a possibility. Besides, large groups narrow down your chances of receiving adequate teacher-to-student interaction.
The second and, in my opinion, best alternative is self-learning (of course 
). And I’ve been lucky to have stumbled on an invaluable set of language learning tools for self-learners: The Pimsleur Method.
Today, we’re going to be looking at Pimsleur Spanish I, which is the first 30-lesson course for absolute beginners. It assumes that you have no prior knowledge in Spanish or in language learning in general. In fact, it omits grammar altogether and makes you learn the language organically.
It may sound counter-intuitive to dismiss grammar, but thanks to Pimsleur I’ve discovered the most efficient way to learn the basics. I’ll tell you why.
How long does it usually take to learn how to have conversations in a new language? As you probably know, I am someone who tends to dislike “Learn _____ in 7 Days” methods, because most of the time these approaches just let you barely scratch the surface—in other words, they fail to provide any substantial value to you. This time, however, I want to present to you an approach to quick language learning because I have first-hand evidence of the successful results.
And, by the way, I’m not trying to sell anything here. I just hope this would introduce you to the simple method by which you can learn a new language in the shortest time possible. But if you want to succeed at it, you have to make sure that you follow the core idea given in this post, because without the effort you’ll just be keeping the results on hold. First, though, I’m going to tell you how my girlfriend (I’ll call her T) went from speaking no English to becoming fluent in just one month.
I’ve tried several audio programs that teach you Cantonese, and I’ve had a lot of success with them, but there’s one that has easily surpassed every other audio course—it’s Pimsleur Cantonese Chinese.
The genius minds behind Pimsleur have created a awesome system that enables you to remember words and phrases almost magically—and more importantly, learn a language with extreme precision and effectiveness. As you know, correct pronunciation is essential in communicating in Cantonese, because even a single blunder in tone can result in violent consequences… But worry not, this audio course places the foremost importance on correct pronunciation, and it effectively guides you how to reproduce the sounds that you hear spoken by the native Cantonese speakers that you will be working with throughout the course.
I just recently redesigned Self-Learner from scratch (I hope you like it), and I learned many practical things about web design–particularly about CSS—that I probably wouldn’t have learned as quickly had I not done the redesign. Doing things without spending too much time on learning the techniques first is a practice I highly recommend to everyone.
There’s an uncountable number of resources out there that we can learn from, but if we don’t put the skills into use, why are we even learning the skills in the first place? We can read twenty articles on how to create logos with Adobe Illustrator, but if we don’t try do it by ourselves, we’re never going to get anywhere. Sure, we learn from the articles and tutorials but we don’t apply the skills in practice. We only accumulate skills in theory and we never make use of them.
You don’t have to become an expert to start employing your skills. Perfectionism can be a good thing, but having too much of it only impedes your progress. Sometimes it’s good to just get the basic idea of something and start doing it.
A few days ago, I wrote a post about how tutorials are an effective way to learn technical skills. Today I’m going to be sharing a collection of hand-picked beginner’s web design tutorials that I’ve personally found useful.
1. HTML Beginner Tutorial
HTML
If you want to learn how to create websites, this is where you should start. HTML Beginner Tutorial starts from the basics. In fact, it even shows you how to print a row of crude text without any tags or decorative attributes.
2. CSS Beginner Tutorial
CSS
CSS lets you decorate your website with cosmetic attributes. If HTML represents the skeleton of your website, CSS is the flesh (and a bit of makeup too).
Self-Learner is a blog about self-education and self-improvement based lifestyle design. Goal? To become the best "version" of yourself, and feel excited to jump out of your bed every morning.