<p>I need to help a college student create a serious and credible Alternative Plan that covers roughly the same territory as his college's standard course in Intermediate Spanish. I figure he needs self-study for grammar and conversational practice, primarily. </p>
<p>Which learning resources do you admire? Skype, workbooks, or digital resources -- what have you found effective? </p>
<p>Foreign travel is beyond reach. There's a modest budget for private tutoring. </p>
<p>Something that keeps a person on track according to a weekly timetable, or with Units he could calendar, would be particularly helpful.</p>
<p>our public library has an online language learning resource called Mango and one called Transparent Languages. Both are free to use and your library may have a similiar one. Yay libraries!!</p>
<p>“roughly the same territory as his college’s standard course in Intermediate Spanish”</p>
<p>It would be helpful if you could lay hands on the textbook and syllabus for that course so that you can be certain to cover the specific vocabulary and grammar points that are included.</p>
<p>Reading is always good. See if your public library has any Spanish-language books - especially if they are in a subject area that the learner is already familiar with, or the Spanish-language edition of a story that the learner knows. I picked up a whole bunch of new vocabulary for things like ceiling lamp, window frame, and door-knob, by reading the Spanish editions of Harry Potter.</p>
<p>DVDs are terrific too. Watch the film with the Spanish sound-track. Stop and watch a scene again and again until you are pretty sure you know what is going on. Watch it with Spanish sub-titles and the sound off and pretend that you are a voice actor performing the dialogue. Then if you still aren’t clear about things, watch it in English. But please remember that song lyrics won’t necessarily have precisely the same meaning in another language!</p>
<p>If you have Spanish-language TV available in your area, pick one of the Telenovelas, and do your best to follow it for the summer. The storylines move slowly and are reasonably predictable. One caveat: there may be a fair amount of nation- or region-specific slang depending on where the telenovela is written and produced.</p>
<p>And for the parent who doesn’t know much Spanish but would like to feel supportive, find out if your library’s website has a link to the Muzzy language learning program for children. (Better yet, they might have one of the ancient VHS sets for it.) Very cute and amusing, and now with additional online games.</p>
<p>What about going to the Concordia Language Camps. They can be spendy if want to earn college credit but otherwise, for what you get, they are reasonable.</p>
<p>Concordia Language Villages are great, but they are for students up through high school. They have some college credit courses, but they’re meant for high schoolers who are on approximately the level of a college junior in foreign language – they tend to be literature-type courses in the foreign language.</p>