As regular readers may know, I’m working my way slowly through 
Teach Yourself Instant Spanish. I’m on week five now (flash cards will be going up on the site soon, once they’ve had a thorough testing) so that’s only a week to go and then some revision to consolidate.
The big question is: does it work? Is this all for nothing? Now, I had good results with Teach Yourself Instant Greek, so I was willing to assume the same of Instant Spanish. And I’ve been having relatively good results with the occasional bits of Spanish I’ve heard on the tele: I even managed to cope without the subtitles during Lost‘s Ana-Lucia flashback last week.
So I decided to do a written test today and I was pleasantly surprised.
Someone’s just posted this request on the Entourage newgroup in Spanish:
Hola a todos
Estoy desesperado porque no hay manera de ordenar los contactos de la
libreta de direcciones. Me gustaría ordenarlos por el nombre, pero cuando
“pincho” en la parte superior de la columna donde dice NOMBRE, me ordena la
lista por el apellido en vez de por el nombre.A ver si alguien me pudiera echar una mano porque ya estoy harto, por no
decir otra cosa.Gracias a todos.
Tried to decipher it then used the Google translator afterwards. You know what? I had actually correctly understood what he’d said. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to reply without a dictionary, but it’s heartening to know that it’s not all a waste of time.
So, if you’re looking to learn enough of a language to get by, these Teach Yourself books do actually work very well.