Website Analysis: Learning Spanish!

Among all the Websites, I have decided to write about learning Spanish through this educational page http://www.studyspanish.com/ which provides free web-based services to Spanish students and teachers.

First of all, I think that this website is focused on the Grammar translation method. Why? Well, it is important to remember that this method requires students to translate whole texts and learn by heart grammatical rules as well as vocabulary lists. The goal of this method is to be able to read and translate everything. In this educational website you can find a lot of sections about pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and verb drills. For example, I got impressed with this words "Anyone who has studied Spanish knows that one of the biggest challenges is to learn all of the verb conjugations". I got the idea that this educational website rather attempts to teach language through rules and not by the use of them in real context.

So, students will start to use them automatically in their speech.

To support my words, I would like to show you this example from the lesson topics:

"Hace ..." to mean "ago

In a previous lesson, you learned to use the verb hacer with the present tense form of a verb to indicate the length of time an action has been taking place:

Hace + time + que + present tense form of the verb

Hace un año que estudio español.
I have been studying Spanish for one year

Learning a language means acquiring receptive and productive skills but throughout this Website via Grammar translation it can be difficult to achieve that goal. Certainly, it has a lot of weaknesses. Is it meaningful to learn Spanish by this way? I really want invite you to think about it.