Beginning in January of this year, I began selling my self designed curriculum, readings and worksheets online through a wonderful forum called Teachers Pay Teachers.  I only discovered this website myself a couple of years ago and became an avid buyer. It was my New Year’s resolution for 2015 to sell my products on this website. It was a lot of work up front, but it is finally paying off. I have created an online community with teachers which has been a wonderful experience as being a solo teacher can sometimes be a lonely endeavour! Furthermore, there are a lot more Spanish teachers in the United States than there are in Canada. I am happy to report that I have received a lot of positive feedback on my products and my current and future students have also benefited from my online feedback as I continue to improve my course content. To access my online resources for teachers click here.

As a number of my clients are required to travel for work I have now regularly started offering lessons over Skype. While it may not be as ideal as face-to-face lessons, I have had a large degree of success with teaching people online and look forward to continuing to offer this option particularly for those people who live further out of the city or travel frequently.

Finally, just this month I have begun to create an online school for my courses! It is my intention to offer this for free to my existing clients for further practice at home where they may review lessons we covered in class together. This online platform will offer yet another avenue to pursue your language goals. I have just released my first course on German pronunciation and I look forward to continuing to work on my new online school in the coming months. For my new online school click here.

1. A syllable consists of at least one vowel sound and/or a vowel paired with one or two consonant sounds. (In the examples below the words are both Spanish and English)

animal: 3 syllables: a-ni-mal                                    Argentina: 4 syllables: Ar-gen-ti-na

2a. Words that end in a consonant other than n or s are stressed on the last syllable.

a-zul

2b. Words that end in a vowel, n, or s are stressed on the second to last syllable.

li-bro

2c. Words whose accent falls on the third to last syllable always have an accent (tilde).

rápido

2d. Rarely, words are accented on the fourth, fifth, etc. to last syllable. These are limited to verbs with pronouns attached to them.

mí-ra-me-lo

3. Spanish features both weak and strong vowels. A, E, O are strong while I, U are weak.

This affects pronunciation as two strong vowels cannot be in the same syllable. Therefore, two strong vowels found next to each other belong to separate syllables whereas a combination of a weak and strong vowel, or two weak vowels create a diphthong or a gliding sound which results in a single syllable. In order to break this diphthong, an accent may be placed on one of the vowels.

ma-es-tro

puer-to

far-ma-cia

po-li-cí-a