[MicroBob]

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I always hear this about watching Spanish language TV to learn the language, and I guess intuitively this makes sense because it's basically how we learn our native language in the first place. Having people speak at you and around you until you start understanding.

Although I haven't spent a lot of time on this I've tried this before and I never seem to be able to pick up on ANYTHING even with context, mostly because they speak way too fast and I just don't understand how, without speaking it to other people how this would work.

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I'm with JJ. They are way too fast for me. No chance of keeping up.
But I've been learning a few words here and there with a translation book and the occasional CD listen.

Watching the spanish programming with the closed-captioning helps me a lot. When they say the word super-fast and slur them all together like people normally do I can't catch it.
But when I can read it while they are saying it then I can figure out much better what's going on.

I also think you could do okay watching English programming with spanish captioning or sub-titles and pick up a little bit as you go if you are concentrating.

Even better if DVD's of movies are TV shows that you are really familiar with have an option to view it with Spanish dubbing and captioning.

Whether it's a movie like Star Wars or Dude, Where's my Car? if you've seen it enough times and pretty much know most of the lines then you should be able to learn something if you focus on it pretty closely in spanish because you always have some idea of what it is they're supposed to be saying.

Something like this is what I'm thinking of trying in the future. It just takes effort and I haven't put too much into it although I know more than I did 2 years ago.
I'll get there eventually.