Learning Spanish II: How to Understand and Speak a New Language

Learning Spanish II: How to Understand and Speak a New Language follows on The Great Courses’ highly acclaimed first Spanish course, taking you to the next level of mastery of this beautiful and incredibly useful language. This exciting program grounds you in the fundamentals that will help you work toward fluency, enhancing your ability to converse with your Spanish-speaking friends and acquaintances, to speak Spanish more skillfully as a traveler—to enjoy the thrill and pleasure of communication in a language spoken by half a billion people around the world.

Professor Worden’s system makes learning Spanish both fun and wonderfully accessible, and this course is expertly organized to give you the elements of Spanish most vital to daily communication. Within each lesson, you’ll work with three fundamental learning “modules,” each of which builds facility with listening and speaking in Spanish:

• Grammar: First, you’ll continue to build the core elements of grammar—the “skeleton” of the language—giving you a solid foundation for using Spanish in many contexts. In each lesson, you’ll build facility with verbs, adding important verb tenses for expressing actions in the present, past, future, as well as the vital conditional tense. You’ll also communicate using the imperative and subjunctive moods, which allow you to express commands, desires, feelings, and states of mind. Moreover, you’ll further your work with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, prepositions, pronouns, and their essential usage.
• Vocabulary: An ample vocabulary underlies real fluency, and here Professor Worden teaches you a rich and broad spectrum of words and expressions, reflecting those used most frequently in the Spanish language. Each lesson adds useful new vocabulary to your repertoire, and key lessons delve into specific vocabulary on subjects ranging from health and medicine to money, shopping, cooking, time, family, and more.
• Culture: Each lesson grounds you in a knowledge of the Spanish-speaking world, as it applies to using Spanish—the cultures, customs, and ways of thinking that surround the Spanish language. Here, you’ll learn how Spanish differs from English as a medium of expression, and you’ll delve into subjects such as the evolution of the Spanish language, the geography of the Spanish-speaking world, and iconic works of art and literature.

About the Author

Dr. Bill Worden is an Associate Professor of Spanish at The University of Alabama. He received his A.B. in Mathematics from Dartmouth College, his M.A. in Spanish from Middlebury College and his Ph.D. in Hispanic Studies from Brown University.

Since 2002, Dr. Worden has taught a wide variety of courses at The University of Alabama, ranging from Introductory Spanish and Advanced Grammar and Composition to undergraduate and graduate courses in 16th- and 17th-century Spanish literature.

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