In choosing to walk the Camino Portugués, my brother Don and I have committed to two spending a month or so walking across two countries where we don't speak the local language. I told Don that he was in charge of Portuguese and that I would take care of Spanish.
To help me with my Spanish, I've started the free lessons provided by Duolingo. It's a pretty neat site. It provides a number of exercises to help you learn a language. Each exercise is one of the following activities:
- Given a written phrase in English, type the Spanish phrase.
- Given a written phrase in English, select all the correct Spanish translations of those listed.
- Given a written phrase in Spanish, type the English phrase.
- Given a written phrase in English, speak the Spanish phrase. It uses speech-to-text technology to determine if you're right.
- Given an spoken phrase in Spanish, type it out in Spanish.
It's a pretty neat system, and I like it a lot. I definitely can't complain with free! They offer other languages (including Portuguese). While I don't expect this will make me anything close to fluent, it will at least give me enough Spanish to survive.
That reminds me; I need to add a Spanish phrase-book/dictionary to my gear list!
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