Spanish has always beckoned -- a language with a large following, a rich literature, and a vocabulary that overlaps English; with regular plurals, only two real genders, scarcely any declension even for pronouns, and much syntactic work performed by a few tidy prepositions. Hard to resist -- especially for one relocating to Mexico. Luckily, spoken Spanish abounds on the Web, often with visual aids; and, here in the U.S., often on television:
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TV ON THE WEB
Broadband-Television.com Stations from Spain and the Western Hemisphere. Perhaps an even bigger selection at
FindInternetTV.com
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ON YOUR CABLE TV
UNIVISIÓN The big Spanish-language cable network has scheduling and lots of other info online here. On its TV lineup, there are telenovelas, daily dramas, news, talk shows, kids shows, and lots of music.
Our Seattle Univision station,
KUNS-TV, now offers local news twice a day; and, as of June 2008, some of the programs are again closed-captioned.
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| For TELEMUNDO, the NBC-owned rival, there is general information on this Yahoo! page, but for scheduling you may need to consult local outlets -- try Google.
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| For even more extras, like the lyrics to those theme songs, try esmas.com
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LARGELY TEXT
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WordReference.com English to French, Italian & Spanish -- and vice-versa. And now, German and Russian (!) as well.
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| Looking for ways to include those diacritical marks? Check
starr.net's Keyboard Help Page. My favorite for simplicity and portability is the Alt Key method.
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| Wondering about the origin of a Spanish word? The
Real Academia Español has two big dictionaries on its site that sometimes provide etymologies. There's also a less-rigorous Chilean Diccionario Etimológico.
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Latin American Publications
From the University of Texas at San Antonio -- for fans of news, reading, or politics.
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Deutsche Welle no longer offers much audible Spanish, but their textual material is still rich, and it's available in about thirty other languages, for those who are native speakers of less-common tongues.
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The
Spanish Language Page at About.com. Besides helpful tips, there are articles about linguistic history etc.
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| Book reports: Alex recommends Complete Spanish Grammar, by Gilda Nissenberg (McGraw-Hill), a workbook in 26 units. For a handy reference work, there's Routledge's Modern Spanish Grammar.
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