Author

Bill Ferguson
Bill Ferguson

Spanish Teaching Resources

Getting good quality teaching and resources

The information I am going to share is an honest account of what I have tried over the past year and my opinions are just that. . opinions. I will share my likes and dislikes, what works for me and what doesn't. This is a personal experience, I am not an expert but if you share my ambition of learning to communicate in a third, foreign language, then maybe we can help each other along the way.

Getting good quality teaching and resources is vital to success: encouraged by an influential book by Harry Ferber I now view language acquisition as a military campaign, I need to use my resources efficiently to overcome all resistance, I need to capture vocabulary and not let it escape. I need to wear down the opposition by attacking daily and not allowing it time to regroup. I need to learn the predictable tricks that the new language will play on me and be ready for them (this means learning grammar). Like any military campaign good quality intelligence is vital.

Learning a Third Language

My current ambition is to be able to communicate comfortably in English, French and Spanish. I began to study Spanish in 2008. I have been a student of French, on and off, for about 30 years and up to last year ....read more

Strategic Planning

When I started to think about taking on a third language I realised I had two main worries: firstly I didn't want to lose my second language ...read more

Fear of Losing French

As I see it there is a simple choice ....read more

Archives

1 March 2010

Spanish TV via Satellite in the UK

My new satellite system was installed on Friday and it’s wonderful. I thought I might get half a dozen or so Spanish stations but I can actually get 14 and there may be more that I haven’t found yet.

The installation went smoothly, the guys from Challenge TV in Tenterden, Kent, did a [...]

26 January 2010

En lengua de signos

This is one of my “must watch” weekly programmes. I used to watch it on television but now that TVE has gone from Sky I watch it on my PC.

It is a half hour news and human interest show aimed at the hard of hearing, all the dialogue is at normal speed, texted simultaneously [...]

24 November 2009

TVE International

TVEi has definitely left Sky, they blame Sky for withdrawing from the agreement to retransmit their programs and they suggest any complaints go to Sky. They are still transmitting for free from Eutelsat Hotbird 8 but for most people in the UK with Sky systems this is not much help.

The cheapest way [...]

8 October 2009

Sky Listings Channel 795 TVE

It looks like TVE has gone from the Sky listings. It disappeared from channel 795 about a week ago, for a couple of days it was possible to select it manually through “Other Channels” in the menu, but even that doesn’t work any longer.

Some good news is that the TVE website carries a lot [...]

15 August 2009

Television

TVE and Euronews

The two satellite channels that I view regularly are TVE channel 795 on Sky [see here for update on this channel] and Euronews channel 508 on Sky. Euronews is normally set up in English. If you want Spanish (or French) you need to go into the menu section of your digibox and [...]