I was recently pointed to another Spanish learning site called Notes in Spanish. It is run by a couple in Spain. Marina is Spanish and Ben is English. Their classes combine their skills to offer some very nice learning tools. The approach—both in how they do the training and in what is available for free— is different than the norm. If you are serious about learning Spanish, I highly recommend adding their material to your toolkit.

Of particular importance to me are their podcasts. They are conversational Spanish with some "coolness". They are available for free. The Inspired Beginner level have a reasonable amount of explanation in English. Intermediate and Advanced are just Spanish.

When I was first trying to learn Spanish, one thing I wanted to do was have something to listen to when in the car or out walking the dog. About all that I could find was much too structured. For example, this is how to conjugate ar verbs in the present tense. It was not interesting and it required serious concentration—not a good thing when you are driving in traffic.

What Notes in Spanish offers is quite different. There is a lot of real information but it is incorporated into an interesting interaction between the two of them. It's like you actually want to listen rather than feeling obligated to listen. There is also enough personal information about them that the become real people to you rather than just "the teachers".

While Ben's Spanish is very good, it is not perfect. At times, Marina corrects him which makes them seem all the more human. One concern I had was that they present "Spanish from Spain". It turns out this is a non-issue and the fact that I am from the U.S. and Ben is from England encourages me to think about how British English expressions are sometimes different from Usano English expressions as well.

The non-free content is excellent as well but the fact that you can download a whole assortment of podcasts at three different levels for free gives you a lot of good learning material as well as a chance to see how they present their information. While my own Spanish is beyond beginner, I keep learning things going through their Inspired Beginner podcasts.

Now, I wish they would do a Notes in English that I could get for my wife to learn English.