Working with the Study Dialogue

Near the top of each lesson, you will find two tabs labeled “Study Dialogue” and “Lesson Topics”:

By default, you will begin each lesson in the “Study Dialogue” tab. From within this tab you will have access to the audio player for listening to the audio of each dialogue, as well as a written transcript of the full conversation.

Press play on the audio player to begin listening to the dialogue. As the conversation begins to play you will see each line of the written transcript automatically highlighted in sync with the audio playback:

You will hear a slight pause in the audio after each sentence. Repeat each sentence aloud during the pause provided in the audio. Repeating each sentence aloud will help to reinforce your recognition of the audio as well as to improve your own pronunciation.

As you review the written dialogue, you will see any vocabulary that is being presented for the first time broken out on the right with their accompanying definitions in English:

You can also click or hover over footnotes for additional notes and tips:

While it is important to identify and learn any words that you don't know, your main goal should be to learn the meaning of each sentence as a whole.

Listen and repeat the full conversation at least 2-3 times before moving on to the sections below. Repetition is key to improving your ability to understand native Spanish speakers. The more times you listen through the conversation, the better you will be able to recognize what you hear.

Once you've spent some time studying the dialogue in the Study tab, you'll use the Learn It and Hear It sections to test and solidify your understanding of the material.

Learn It:

The “Learn It” section is designed to test your understanding of the written version of the lesson material. In this section, you'll see each line of the Spanish version of the dialogue, without the English translation.

Read each line and try to recall the English translation from memory. Enter it into the box and then click the “Show Answer” button to see the correct answer and compare your response.

Hear It:

Finally, the “Hear It” section is designed to test your ability to recognize each sentence from the audio, without the assistance of the written text. Click on the audio icon next to each line to hear an individual sentence of the previous dialogue.

Listen to the audio one or more times then write what you hear into the box below (in Spanish). Once you have entered your response, click the “Show Answer” button to see the correct answer and compare your answer.

Recap:

Use the Study Dialogue to listen to and study the full conversation. Then use the exercises in the "Learn It" section to test how well you have learned the meaning of each sentence. Finally, use the exercises in the "Hear It" section to test how well you can recognize each sentence in Spanish when you hear it aloud.

The idea here is to first use the written text to identify and learn any words or phrases that are new to you, and then use the audio to learn to recognize and verbally reproduce the new material. You should find that this process takes conversations that initially may seem indecipherable, and makes readily understable with a modest amount of study and effort.