How I Learned (Enough) Spanish in Three Months

I was taught a second language during my school days but never took it seriously. As far as I was concerned, it wasn’t really important to me. After all, English was more popular and I could get along anywhere in the world with my knowledge of English language, right?

How dead wrong I was.

I realized my mistake when I went to Ecuador on a vacation. I felt a little like a fish out of water. Everywhere I went, everyone was speaking Spanish. Finding someone who could speak English in the smaller centers that I prefer to visit was like finding someone in Canada who could speak Russian. I did pick up a few phrases in Spanish by listening and observing, so I could greet people, order coffee and ask how much something cost, but I felt my skills were very inadequate.

Even though I really felt lost, language-wise, I really loved the people and the country. The scenery was magnificent, and everyone was friendly. So, I made a silent resolve to learn the language, since I was definitely going to be returning to South America.

Being a lover of audio books, I went right ahead and bought a Spanish audio course (Learning Spanish Like Crazy) over the internet, loaded up my Ipod, and practiced while exercising, any time I was in the car for an extended time, and any other time when my hands were busy but my mind was free.

I listened carefully, and repeated the words, sentences and phrases faithfully. Right away, I found phrases I could use, and vocabulary that was memorably presented. What really helped were the translations to English for any word spoken in Spanish, and the way of listening and repeating. Even more appropriate, the speakers were from Latin America, and I was learning the correct pronunciation for that area.

This really confirmed what I had read sometime ago about the power of listening. Just listening is powerful enough to learn virtually any language. After all, isn’t that how we learn as children?

Gradually I picked up and was able to speak a significant amount of Spanish after just 6 weeks.When I eventually went back to Ecuador 3 months later, I was no longer “a fish out of water”. It was incredible, but I was able to achieve this without taking any classes, without hiring any private tutor, without reading any “tutorial” books.

All of this was possible within 3 months from just listening Learning Spanish Like Crazy‘s audio lessons.

Do you know what was most intriguing about this? I did this all in my “free” time. I didn’t commit any special time to this, but the same time I had wasted (or not made full use of) in the past. My favourite was to listen and learn while I went for my daily walks. Each lesson is about 45 minutes, which matched up perfectly with the usual length of my walk!

If I could do this within 3 months, I am certain anyone else can do it too.If there is any language you would love to learn, follow my footsteps and you will be pleasantly surprised what can happen in just 3 months, with the power of audio books.

There are several audio book versions of many leading foreign language study courses that you can get on the Internet.Start your search from www.HearSayBooks.com directly, or via the search engines. Simply type in the phrase or particular title you are interested in and you will be presented with the best results… within seconds.

What Tool Should I Buy?

Confused at which tool to use for listening to your audio books?

The beauty with audio books is that you have more than one option for listening to them.

For those of us who like to be given lots of options for doing certain things instead of being forced to adapt to just one choice, you definitely have lots of options for listening to your audio book.

If you are someone who likes listening while seated on your favorite couch or seated on your desk, listening to your audio book on your CD player is the option for you.

But if you have a desktop or laptop computer, you might prefer listening to your audio book from here.

Most PCs have Digital Audio Players for playing audio books. If your PC doesn’t have any (very unlikely), you can still download them completely free on the Internet. The 2 best digital audio players that you can download free from the Internet include:

RealOne Player: It can be downloaded from their website:-
http://www.Real.com

Windows Media Player: It can also be downloaded from their website:-
http://www.Microsoft.com

But if you would rather listen to your audio book while doing your household chores, dancing, exercising, jogging, commuting to and from work, etc, then you would need portable audio playback devices that you can carry around and listen to, preferably with earphones.

With the ever expanding market of portable audio playback devices, it goes to show that more and more people are now using them, because of the wonderful benefits they provide.

The most common form of these portable audio playback devices are the normal audio CD players or CD-ROM devices. You can carry these around with you while you do your household chores, exercise, jog or commute to and from work.

The more advanced form of these portable audio playback devices for playing audio books, especially those for listening to downloadable audio books, include:

– Audio-ready PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants). Some of these PDAs include Casio CASSIOPEIA and Compaq iPAQ. Both can be pretty expensive, costing as much as about $500 for the Compaq iPAQ and about $400 for the Casio CASSIOPEIA.

– Compatible Portable Audio Players. Some of these include the Creative’s NOMAD Jukebox 3 and the SONICblue’s Rio 900. These are cheaper than PDAs. For example, you can get the SONICblue’s Rio 900 for about $250 from sites such as Sonicblue.com

Or buy an MP3 player – Apple’s IPod is just one example, and some of these now hold up to 80 gigabytes – that’s a lot of books!

Finally, like I said at the start of this article, whatever tool you decide to use in listening to your audio books will depend largely on “how” you prefer listening to your audio books.

For example, for the “young and restless” teenagers they can’t do without the PDAs. I bet you wouldn’t too if you were their age, right? But for the “aged and rusty” who just prefer the ease of being seated on their favorite couch, nothing can be better than listening to their favorite audio books from their “good old” cassette tape player!

How To Choose The Right MP3 Player For You

MP3 players … there are so many choices! How do you know which one is best for you? Read the tips below to help you choose the right mp3 player for your own needs.

1) First of all, you need to find out what are your needs. It sounds obvious, but choosing the right mp3 player for you starts right here.

You should ask yourself “What kind of mp3 player do I want?” and “What I will be using the mp3 player for?”

Can you afford an expensive mp3 player, or do you want a cheaper one? Will you use it while driving to and from work, working around the house or exercising? Should it play video files and show pictures as well? Or maybe you need it to have a FM radio tuner or digital voice recording features.

Find out exactly what you need it for and then it will be much easier to choose.

2) There are two types of mp3 players: flash mp3 players and hard drive mp3 players.

The advantage of the flash mp3 players is that they have no moving parts (they have an embedded memory chip) and are ideal to use while running or exercising. Another advantage is that they are cheaper than hard disk mp3 players.

The disadvantage is that flash mp3 players have relatively low memory, but on the other hand they can be upgraded by choosing a larger memory card.

The other type of mp3 players are similar to computers, considering the fact that they hold the memory on a hard disk. They are also known as “jukeboxes” and have hard drives of 20 GB or more. And this is their main advantage, because you can store much more content. You can play music and audio books and lately display pictures and play video files as well.

However, you need to know that the hard disk is not upgradeable, so you should decide right from the start how much storage space do you really need. Another disadvantage is that they are expensive compared to the flash mp3 players.

3) If price is important to you, then you need to know that you can have a flash mp3 player for $100 or less. The most expensive hard drive mp3 players can cost in the $500 range.

However, as new models appear all the time, older quality models are now available at cheaper prices, even for the hard drive mp3 players.

4) Research before you buy. We often tend to buy on impulse, but please don’t do it. It is very easy to get on the Internet and check the websites with reviews from other users or comparison websites. This way you can find “insider” information that you would otherwise have no access to.

You can even find websites that will show you web sites with various prices for the same mp3 player, and the differences can be quite large. You never know when you can find a really good deal.

Basically, know what you want and need and then do the research. This way you can be almost sure that you will choose the right mp3 player for you.

5 Great Audios for Business People

For most of us who are business people, we love to improve our business acumen via reading and taking courses, but we often lack the time to do so. This is where audio books have come to play a very important role in our lives. As a business person, you can now use the amazing value inherent in listening to audio books. You won’t have to worry about not having the time or will to flip through the pages of a book. With an audio book you can enjoy the same value of any business book when preparing to go to work in the morning, when commuting to and from work, or any time that is ‘down-time’. If you are at a loss for the specific business audio books to go for, below are 5 of some of the best that any business person should listen to: 1. How To Win Friends And Influence People – by Dale Carnegie I don’t know about you, but the most important aspect of my business is PEOPLE. For almost every endeavor of life, especially business, we need people to keep the business going. Not just the people that bring us sales, but also the people that make the sales possible. To be able to succeed at this, we all need to know “how to win friends and influence people”. That’s why this incredible book by Dale Carnegie is a “must have” for any person in business. With the power of the information contained in this book, you can learn, not just how to influence people so that they bring in more sales for your business, but most importantly how to win your friends and staff that help you make the sales possible. Now in audio book format, you can enjoy this book from the comfort of your car while commuting to and from your job. 2. It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small… It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow – by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton In today’s business, one of the single most common words that we need to embrace is “CHANGE”. In this era where what was the latest yesterday is no longer the latest today, we need to constantly be ready to embrace change. This audio book by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, provides you with all of the information on how to keep your company afloat, despite the ever-changing nature of business today. Asserting that the fastest organizations in the world today will be those that will thrive, this audio book shows you how to make your company or business among the fastest, using the power of commerce, deployment of resources and good management of people. 3. Management Challenges for the 21st Century – by Peter F. Drucker When it comes to business management and leadership, one name stands tall in any gathering of experts. That name is Peter F. Drucker. Being an expert of the industry and writing about it for a staggering 80 years, Drucker is not just talking from theory. He has been there and done that, when it comes to business and management. This audio book thoroughly examines how business people can handle the management challenges that the 21st century ushers. 4. Jack: Straight from the Gut – by Jack Welch There’s no denying the fact that Jack Welch is one of the world’s most successful CEOs ever. In this powerful thought-provoking audio book, he tells his story detailing how you can follow his steps to become one of the most successful persons in your career today. 5. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap – by Jim Collins You can’t argue with the fact that “without the techniques and strategies, no company or business can excel beyond a few days, weeks or even months”. Businesses and companies that have stood the test of time for many years know what to do and they have done it right. Jim Collins took the time to conduct extensive researches into how and what companies did to maintain success for many long years, while their counterparts failed within a few months or years of starting up. The power of the information contained within this audio book can help any business person to succeed. These 5 audio books can do a lot for your business and career if you take the time to listen to them, and apply what you will learn therein to your business and career. For even more audio book titles, visit the Business and Self Help category listings at http://www.HearSayBooks.com.

10 best audio books to expand your mind

It’s indeed incredible that not many people pay a great deal of attention to what gets into their minds.

You see, the mind is the single most important factor in determining who you are and what you do as an individual.

If your mind is positive and creative, you can become all you ever dream of becoming.

Most of the highly successful people you see in the news today took a great deal of time to work on improving their minds.

On the other hand, if your mind is negative and inactive, it’s very likely you won’t amount to anything in life. Analyzing the lives of some of the most notorious people in the world would reveal that they always fed their minds with negative thoughts.

The question that obviously comes to play here is – are we born with positive or negative minds?

I will quickly and firmly say NO to both!

We develop our minds by what we put into it. If we are continually putting negative information into our minds, this results to negative thoughts and ultimately negative actions.

So, if you want the opposite creative thoughts, it is pertinent to always get the right kind of information into your mind.

The most common way to do this is by reading the right kinds of books.

Sadly, because of the great demand on our time, only few people still read lots of books, especially after college.

We mostly only have time to read the newspapers and magazines. And guess what? Most newspapers only end up giving us bad news that further increase our negative state of mind.

If you want to really get positive and helpful information, you need to read books that contain such information.

Thankfully with the advent and popularity of audio books, anyone can get the right information into his or her mind without having to “read”.

You can enjoy the benefits of audio books while exercising, commuting to and from your work, etc.

For those who don’t know exactly the audio books to go for, below are some of the 10 best audio books to improve your mind.

1. Build Your Self Esteem

Author: Glenn Harrold Publisher:
Diviniti Publishing

2. Awaken the Giant Within

Author: Anthony Robbins
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

3. Develop a Powerful Memory

Author: Glenn Harrold
Publisher: Diviniti Publishing

4. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Author: Stephen R. Covey Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

5. How to Win Friends & Influence People

Author: Dale Carnegie Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

6. The Secret

Author: Rhonda Byrne
Publisher: Simon& Schuster

7. Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

Author: Susan Jeffers
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio

8. The Power is within You Author: Louise L. Hay Publisher:
Hodder Headline Audio books

9. Creating Inner Peace and Calm

Author: Glenn Harrold
Publisher: Diviniti Publishing

10. Get Up and Do It!

Publisher: BBC Books

Any or all of these audio books can be bought from some of the leading audio book stores on the Internet. Please check my website at www.hearsaybooks.com to find even more titles to help you expand your mind and improve your life.

Why Would You Buy a “Talking Book:?

How many benefits can you think of? Here are five of my most compelling ones:

More Time: Audio books allow you to listen anywhere and everywhere. Walking the dog, driving to and from work, exercising, working around the house. You love reading but don’t have the time? No problems. Audio books will give you back the freedom. Everyone has ‘dead time’ periods, and audio books are a great way to fill that time.

Learn New Stuff: Extend your job skills, learn a new language, improve your relationships – we all want to learn something, and listening to audios can be a way to do so when and where you choose. The possibilities are endless.

Great Gifts:  Audio books are great for ill or recovering people and can be a wonderful gift for someone during nursing. This will be a gift they can enjoy time after time. Or, if you know someone who’s about to take a long plane ride, gift them with a best-seller to listen to.

Easier Than Braille: Everyone should have the chance to experience and enjoy books. In many cases this is the most enjoyable way for visually impaired people to do so.

Great Baby Sitter:  Audio books are an excellent way to stimulate your child’s imagination, and interest him/her to acquire the skill to read. Listening can allow your child to gain and improve vocabulary. Long car rides become less stressful if your child is occupied listening to thrilling stories.

I’m sure you can think of a lot more!!

“University on Wheels”

University on Wheels?

Brian Tracy, one of America’s top business gurus, uses that phrase. What does he mean?

By listening to professional audio books while driving to and from work or school each morning, we have automatically enrolled in this ‘University’.

Why waste 2 or more hours each day commuting to and from work? So much can be done with this ‘wasted’ time. Instead of listening to the radio, thinking of the past, or mentally rearranging your day, plug in an informational audio book.

Did you know that by listening to a good professional audio book each day you could gain the equivalent to a full university education within years? This may sound unlikely, but let me explain.

Most university degree programs require that students spend no more than 10 hours attending lectures weekly, where they are doing what?…listening!

By listening to the right audio books on the subject that you want to learn about, you can gain the same amount of knowledge… and it is focused to YOUR NEEDS AND INTERESTS!

Now, no university will give you a degree after you have finished listening to your audio books, but you will have gained a large amount of new knowledge, and if it is something that you are really interested in, then you are more likely enjoy listening to the information and therefore more likely to retain more of it.

Why continue to “waste” valuable time on your daily drive to work when you can gain so much by using those hours to learn a new skill, a new business idea or a new language?

Ask yourself, “What would I love to learn?”… a new language, better sales skills and presentation skills, how to cook nutritionally sound meals, methods of meditation? When you find your niche, search for an audio book or series on that topic.

Audio books are available in downloadable formats such as mp3 or WMA files, so that you have the opportunity to listen to the book in a way that suits you best.

So… what are you waiting for? Start your very own “University on Wheels”.

So, even if you don’t drive to work you can listen on the bus using your CD player or IPod. You can continue your “education” while walking the dog, grocery shopping or doing the housework

Begin your education in your chosen topic today!!

Powerful Benefits to Choosing Audiobooks for Your Children

Would you like your children to read more? Many parents are choosing audiobooks to enrich their child’s imagination and to encourage them to develop lifelong reading habits. Whether it’s on long trips in the car, in the classroom, or just for enjoyment at home, listening to an exciting story can catch the attention of a generation that is used to playstations, television and the internet.

The Commission on Reading report entitled “Becoming a Nation of Readers” states that the single most important activity for building the knowledge required for success in reading is reading aloud to children. The spoken word has been the primary way that people communicated and learned for centuries. ‘Audio reading’ makes sense, especially in this digital age, when today’s children can instantly download a book to their MP3 players.

Experts in the classroom agree that audio books in the classroom go a long way to help students enjoy reading, much more than normal books. This is especially true for children with reading difficulties. Following along in a printed book while listening to a story can greatly improve their learning skills. By listening to a story, weaker readers can more fully participate in group reading and discussions and so increase confidence and self esteem.

Incorporating audio books into a program can enrich a child’s language, increase speech fluency, improve pronunciation, and inspire curiosity about related subjects and stories. More prosaic benefits include the cost benefit – a downloaded MP3 file is much less expensive that purchasing a book. Consider the cost savings for an entire classroom! Another benefit is that children are exposed to more than just one ‘teacher’, creating more time for teacher preparation and focus work.

Audio books provide an enjoyable way for children to learn in a natural and entertaining manner, and can encourage a love of literature that can last a lifetime.

If you’d like to add audio books to your childrens library, please visit my website, http://www.hearsaybooks.com. You’ll find audio books for children of all ages, instantly downloadable, and much more economical than bookstore prices.