It may appear odd to you that someone is talking about “learning Spanish” on this website. Here is why.

My son is a tennis player, a quite good one. Growing up in Australia, where most of the tennis courts are synthetic gross, which no serious tournaments in the world use. He dreamed one day he can train in Spain, on the red dert, just like Marat Safin did, who happens to be his hero.

So we made a deal. He needed to keep improving his tennis and also started to learn Spanish. I would, of course start to save money so that one day he can go to a top tennis academy, like Sánchez-Casal in Spain.

We then started to research on the Internet to find a basic Spanish course that we could start with as the only Spanish we can speak was “Hasta la vista, baby”. To tell you the truth, we didn’t really know what that means, but it sounded pretty cool. It didn’t take us long before we found this website: http://www.mangolanguages.com, the interface is very appealing, not as boring as most of the websites. We also liked the feature that you can click on the word in the sentence and you can hear the pronunciation. And the best of all, it was free. Learning a second language is a very daunting task and it takes a lot of patience and efforts. I know that because I learned English as my second language. So I decided to join him and I hoped that I could somehow motivate him.

That is how we started, and all went quite well at the beginning, we were doing 2 lessons a week and we started using Spanish words like “Gracias”, “Adios” in the house. A couple of months later, we all have completed about 30 lessons. But then the initial excitement seemed to disappear, the words became harder and harder to remember and the worst of all, we kept forgetting what we had learned before. We started to get more and more confused with the words. A few weeks later, Christmas was approaching and things were stalled. And of course we all had very good reasons. I was getting busier at work and my son needed more time for homework, etc, etc. Execuses are alwasy easy to find.

Soon after the new year, my son was injured when completing in a local tournament and the doctor ordered him to take 8 weeks off. Then we thought we couldn’t give up Spanish that easily, we had to keep it going. So we went back to “mangolanguages” again, but this time it wasn’t free anymore. I was disappointed of course, but then I thought since we had already done 30 lessons, why not just continue with it, plus since we need to pay for it, it might add some extra pressure to get most of it. So I paid the money and started over again.

But this time, I thought we needed to do something a bit different to help us remember things better. So I started to write down all the new words in each lesson and paid extra attention to the verbs, as they are so confusing. Pity that “mangolanguages” doesn’t give must explanation to the verbs.

To share notes with my son, I started to use this website and here we are.

If you come across to this website for whatever reason and find any error in the post, please kindly leave a comment. After all, we don’t want to learn something that is not correct.