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Loquella Girl
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Quote Loquella Girl Replybullet Topic: Free, FSI Spanish Basic Course Just Launched
    Posted: 27 January 2007 at 1:52pm

Hello,

I wanted to let the group know www.Loquella.com just launched, and it’s a completely free site that has incorporated almost all of the content from the FSI Spanish Basic course. Just visit www.Loquella.com/learn-spanish, turn on the volume on your computer and press the Next button to get started. You go through all the FSI material by listening to the audio and reading the corresponding sentences in Spanish and English using a Flash movie. The first 55 lessons are based completely off the FSI Spanish material. (Each lesson has between 500 and 1000 sentences to practice and repeat). Lessons 56 – 63 are dialect lessons where you can listen to real stories told by native speakers in his or her distinct dialect, based on which country he or she is from.

 
We feel that FSI developed a great method for teaching Spanish, and we hope that this free, online learning tool can help make the program more easily accessible for people all over the world. Start learning Spanish, or use the tool to practice what you already know.  It’s completely free! I welcome and appreciate your comments and suggestions.

Thanks for your time,

Rebecca

www.loquella.com/learn-spanish

Loquella Girl
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daristani
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Quote daristani Replybullet Posted: 27 January 2007 at 6:04pm
Thanks for this heads-up Loquella Girl; I just went to the site and found it very easy to use; the sound quality was excellent, and clicking through the sound files/exercises was very quick and easy.

FYI for others interested in Spanish, the Loquella site, to the extent that I have been able to determine from a brief visit, divides the FSI Basic Spanish course into tiny, tiny bits, of just a couple of seconds, essentially one line at a time; you click for a repetition of each tiny bit, which starts instantaneously and is very clear.  It's just like listening to the FSI course (the same speakers and indeed the same audio, as far as I can tell), except that you control, with your mouse, how many times you repeat it and how much of a gap you leave for yourself to repeat afterwards, provide an oral response, etc.  You can click forward and backward easily, thus allowing you to hear/repeat items as many times as you like.  Accordingly, it's a great way to drill while on-line, and you can jump to different portions of different lessons very quickly.  All in all, it struck me as a very interesting and useful way to apply the course.

This brings up the question as to whether it replaces the FSI Basic Course being put up on this site, through the efforts of Sir Nigel.  Frankly, and while appreciating the fact that putting the entire course, text and audio, on this site will be a very, very big job, I would still see it as worth doing, and suspect that other learners of Spanish (who constitute, I suspect, a major portion of the visitors and members at this site) would still very much like to have the full texts of the books and the full audio in MP3 format for download and use away from one's computer.  As I see it, the Loquella site provides an excellent resource for on-line drilling, but for learners of Spanish who would like the freedom of hearing the audio while away from their computers, the PDF texts and MP3 files would still be quite useful.  I can only speak with certainty on this for myself, however, and so think it would be useful if others interested in Spanish would sound off on the topic.  For myself, I much appreciate Sir Nigel's work to date, and hope that he might be willing/able to continue to post the course here, as his time and energy allow.
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gavin1066
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Quote gavin1066 Replybullet Posted: 27 January 2007 at 10:17pm

The Loquella site doesn’t seem to allow the downloading of learning materials.

I only have a dialup Internet connection, but high-speed access at work. Downloading the audio/text files and not tying up the phone line is definitely more convenient.

I really can’t wait for Sir Nigel to post the text for the FSI Basic Spanish course.  I appreciate the effort, please don’t discontinue.

Muchas gracias.

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onebir
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Quote onebir Replybullet Posted: 28 January 2007 at 5:06am
I also think it's critical for resources to allow offline use...
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Loquella Girl
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Quote Loquella Girl Replybullet Posted: 28 January 2007 at 4:29pm
Thanks so much for the nice review Daristani! We really hope that this site can be a resource for anyone trying to learn Spanish (and eventually other languages as well). We also do not want to discourage anyone from making the lessons available to everyone in other formats. We hope that this is something that people can use in conjunction with many other learning programs.
Also, we are working on making it faster for dial up connections.
 
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adtausa
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Quote adtausa Replybullet Posted: 29 January 2007 at 9:44am
I agree with onebir.
It is essential to have the files available for offline viewing.
 
I wish you the best.
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Michael Sheehan
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Quote Michael Sheehan Replybullet Posted: 21 February 2007 at 8:04pm

Notwithstanding the inherent power of Loqulla Girl's (fantastic would be the word) site, down-loadability is a 'have to have' feature for me, in that I use an MP3 player during my morning one-hour walk.

 
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