Hey Bob, Cuéntamelo, my new Spanish course, closes to new students in two days. Four weeks to stop sounding like a polite child in Spanish and start expressing yourself like the adult you are, built around a mystery you read and eight live sessions where you talk about it. Click here to see the course before enrolment closes I want to talk about the eight live sessions, because they are where everything else in the course turns into Spanish you can actually use. El Reloj de los Pirineos was written for this course, at your level, with the past tenses, the sequencing and the cause and consequence language built into the plot on purpose. So you arrive at each session having read something you genuinely want to discuss, holding the exact Spanish you need to discuss it. Both halves matter, and it is the combination that is rare. Without the story, a conversation class drifts back to the weather. Without the room, the Spanish stays on the page. And somebody asking you what you think, in Spanish, and then waiting for the answer, is a hard thing to come by. So picture a session. Eight or so adults, all at your level, all of whom read the same chapter you did that week. Your tutor, Dave Pinto, asks what you make of it. Somebody says they think Antonio is hiding something. Somebody else disagrees. You have a view, and for once you have the words, because you read the chapter and the words are fresh. You say it. Not perfectly. Perfectly is not the point. The group answers back. And you answer that. The group matters as much as the teacher here. Everyone in that room has had the same experience you have had: understanding the conversation, having a view, and going quiet anyway. Nobody is judging your subjunctive. They are all busy building their own sentence. And nobody is put on the spot. Nothing is graded. You get sentence starters if you want them, and in a discussion about who the crossed out name belongs to, having an opinion is usually enough to get you talking. If the thought of speaking makes you a bit nervous, I want to be clear: that is exactly who this was built for.
A word about who is running the room. Your tutor, Dave Pinto, did not inherit Spanish. He is a native English speaker who learned it as an adult, from scratch, and took it all the way to near native. That matters more than it sounds. A teacher who grew up speaking Spanish can tell you what is correct. Dave can tell you why the thing you just said came out wrong, because he made the same mistake once and remembers fixing it. He then did the rarer thing and taught Spanish in both directions, Spanish to English speakers and English to Spanish speakers. He tends to see where an English speaking brain is about to break before you do. Four Conversation & Story Club sessions, four Language Labs, all of them recorded with full replays. Click here to see how the live sessions work and enrol Enrolment closes at the end of the day on Tuesday. Join Cuéntamelo and get in the room See you on the inside, Olly |
