On 21 April, UNESCO, the Library of Congress, and 32 partner institutions will launch the World Digital Library. This multi-lingual site will provide free access to a wealth of cultural materials, such as books, manuscripts, maps, drawings, photographs, recordings and films, from libraries and archives from across the globe.

The collections will be searchable and browsable through the medium of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

Spanish Proficiency Exercises
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/spe/index.html

This site hosts an excellent collection of short video interviews with a variety of native Spanish speakers from Latin America and Spain. There are a total of 85 tasks divided into Beginning, Intermediate (A & B), Advanced (A & B) and Superior levels. In each task there are half a dozen QuickTime video clips that you can watch online, with or without transcripts in Spanish or English visible. Alternatively, you can download the clips in m4v format to view on an iPod. The page for each task also provides access to short notes on related vocabulary, phrases and grammar.

Spanish Civilization
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/spn328/

This is a fascinating cultural compendium containing the following categories: Arquitectura, Pintura, Mapas, Música, and Antigüedad. In the Pintura section, for example, there are then separate pages for nine different artists, including Velázquez, Goya and Picsasso. A selection of works is given for each, and details of the work are provided in a question-and-popup-answer format. Goya’s El dos de mayo de 1808, for instance, has the following Q & A:

Q: ¿Qué representa este cuadro? ¿Qué características de la pintura romántica se pueden ver en él?

A: El cuadro, pintado por comisión de Fernando VII después de la Guerra de Independencia, en 1814, muestra la resistencia del pueblo madrileño contra las tropas francesas que habían ocupado la ciudad. También es conocido como “La carga de los mamelucos”. Es un buen ejemplo de pintura romántica porque muestra mucha acción violenta, emociones fuertes y personajes exóticos (como los mamelucos, soldados egipcios del ejército francés, con sus uniformes orientales), así como por su patriotismo y glorificación del pueblo español en su lucha por la independencia.

Cantar de mio Cid
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/cid/

This interactive Flash website provides a number of different ways of experiencing the epic poem. You can, for example, see images of the individual pages of the fourteenth century manuscript whilst listening to it being read in Old Spanish (all 5 hours 9 minutes and 28 seconds) and reading along at the same time. The transcriptions are shown in both ‘paleographic’ and ‘normative’ form. The former is taken directly from the manuscript and the latter serves as a link between the original form and modern editions of the poem. There is also an English translation visible at the same time.

Spanish Grammar Exercises
http://www.laits.utexas.edu/spex/siteindex.php

Aimed primarily at University of Texas first-year Spanish students, this site provides 22 sets of interactive, fill-in-the-blank exercises.

LANIC – The Latin American Network Information Center
http://lanic.utexas.edu/indexesp.html

This portal site is available in English, Portuguese and Spanish and has pointers to a wealth of information on a wide variety of topics related to Latin America. The subject categories covered include: Economy, Education, Geography & Environment, Government, Humanities, Internet & Computing, Libraries & Reference, Media & Communication, Recreation, Science, Social Sciences, and Society & Culture.

http://www.mepsyd.es/exterior/uk/es/tecla/tecla.shtml

You can browse their list of available videos for Modern Foreign Languages and then watch the streaming videos online without having to log in (UK only).

The following Spanish series are available:

• La tienda de Luis
  Set in the old town of Oviedo in the Spanish region of Asturias / aimed at learners aged 9-12 / 5 episodes
  http://www.teachers.tv/video/2417

• Extra
  Flat sharing sitcom / aimed at learners aged 14-16 / 4 episodes
  http://www.teachers.tv/video/1887

• Aventuras Vascas
  Spanish series tracking the progress of two students in Bilbao / aimed at learners aged 14-17 / 5 episodes
  http://www.teachers.tv/video/1892

All the sounds of the Spanish language are illustrated with animations showing the mechanics of the production of the sound, together with step-by-step descriptions.

There are also video clips of a Spanish speaker saying each sound (in isolation and also in various example words).

The units available are:

• Espacios públicos (Introductory / 20 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2439

• La historia piedra a piedra (Intermediate / 12 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2951

• Con mis propias manos (Intermediate / 12 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2610

• Perspectivas porteñas (Advanced / 4 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2952

This is divided into 16 thematic sections on topics such as Food, Friends, Money, Swearwords, etc.

You can listen on the site to the phrases one at a time and read an accompanying explanation. You can also download the phrases in each section as an MP3 file.

Sin embargo, la mayor parte de estas extensiones están únicamente en inglés. Así que, considerando que este es un blog bilingüe y como contribución a todos aquellos hispanohablantes que utilizan WordPress, hemos preparado una serie de traducciones de una gran cantidad de las extensiones o plugins más populares de esta plataforma.

Para descargarlos, encuentre el listado completo aquí:
http://www.es-xchange.com/translations/

Actualizado al 27/Marzo/2009

Herman Ebbinghaus was the first psychologist to investigate the ability to retain information after learning it. In 1885 he derived his so-called forgetting curves from the results of his experimental work. These curves plot the amount of information remembered against the time elapsed since learning it.

This relationship can be approximately modelled as an exponential decay. With this type of curve the rate at which items are forgotten is initially relatively high, but as time progresses this rate decreases. The steepness of the curve is inversely related to the strength of memory, which is very low (giving a steep curve) for meaningless material, such as random series of letters, and very high (giving a much flatter curve) for vivid memories.

On subsequent reviews of the material being learned, the strength of memory increases and so the forgetting curve starts off again but with its slope reduced. This means that after each review the material will be retained for a longer period. This is the basis of the learning technique known as spaced repetition, in which initially material is reviewed frequently, but after each review the time until the next review is increased.

An effective way of memorising facts is to use flashcards. A question is written on one side of a card, and the answer on the other. Armed with a deck of such cards you can then review your material by looking at the front of each card in turn, mentally answering the question, then turning the card over to reveal the answer. This can be a useful approach for learning vocabulary, where words or phrases in your first language are written on one side of the cards and their counterparts in your target language on the other. Looking at the target-language side of the cards first lets you practise recognition; looking at the opposite side first lets you practise production.

Time spent learning in this way can be made much more efficient by adopting the spaced repetition approach. This strategy is aimed at optimising your learning effort by increasing the amount of time between subsequent reviews of the items with which you are familiar. A very popular flashcard-based learning system that incorporates this concept is the Leitner System, developed by Sebastian Leitner and described in his 1972 book So lernt man lernen (How to learn to learn).

In the Leitner system you have a series of groups, or card boxes, and the very process of reviewing your cards sorts them into these boxes according to how easy or difficult you find the material.

Initially all the cards in your deck are placed in box 1. When you review these if you get a card right, you promote it to box 2; if you get it wrong, it stays in box 1. And when you review the cards in box 2, correctly answered ones are promoted to box 3 and incorrectly answered ones are demoted back down to box 1. This process continues for however many boxes you have. When a card is placed in a box after being reviewed it is always added to the bottom of the pile of cards in that box.

The higher the box number, the longer the period of time you can allow between reviews. The material you know best ends up towards the far end of the series of boxes and consequently requires least time to be spent on it; whereas, the material that you need to devote most time to stays in the boxes near the start of the series, which are reviewed more frequently. You therefore do not waste time reviewing material you already know well and more time is spent on the harder to learn cases. New cards can be added into the learning system at any time. These are always initially added into box 1 and will work their way through the box set as your periodic reviews progress.

Today the Leitner system is widely used in electronic flashcard software applications. Over 200 flashcard-based-learning titles, many of which incorporate the Leitner System, are compared at the site Memorization Software Reviewed. The reviews on this site are based on comprehensive and rigorous educational principles and their top recommendation is Paul Rädle’s excellent Windows shareware product, VTrain.

At first sight this software might seem a little daunting to use, but with a prior understanding of the Leitner system and after a perusal of its built-in tutorial (Help / Tutorial), VTrain is actually very straightforward to use and it has a clean, well organised user interface giving access to its comprehensive set of features. Cards can be created and updated using the built-in editor, which supports rich text, images and voice recording. The set of boxes to be used is defined in a cardfile. When a new cardfile is created it defaults to having five boxes. The cardfile can then be filled with one or more decks of cards. New cards can be created at any time. And VTrain’s scheduling feature gives a visual indication of when cards in a box become due for review. The default review periods for boxes 2, 3, 4, and 5 are every 1 day, 2 days, 4 weeks, and 8 weeks, respectively. The cards in any given box can, however, be reviewed at any time.

VTrain provides a very flexible solution for learning virtually any subject by means of flashcards — which are, of course, an ideal method of reviewing vocabulary when learning another language.