We begin with learning how to form the most important types of questions, providing the opportunity to learn critical structures and vocabulary for a range of situations, including restaurants, shopping, talking to friends, and taking transportation. These and other areas are further enhanced by practice with key verbs and adjectives, ultimately enabling you to express needs and desires wtih a considerable degree of detail. Possessives, pronoun usage, and the formation of future tense sentences expand your range of communication while adding an important level of depth to your interactions. Further work on location along with important commands rounds out your introduction to the Spanish language, allowing you to better navigate a city as well as make plans with friends and colleagues.

Right from the start we begin working with powerful structures and key vocabulary that allow you to build useful Spanish sentences. By the end of only a few sessions we're already able to have meaningful interactions in a restaurant, and soon the necessary pieces for shopping, making plans with friends, getting around a city, handling basic office tasks, going out for entertainment, and making travel arrangements fall into place. It's within these types of realistic scenarios that we develop a strong base in the fundamentals of the language across the first two levels: from the broader issue of forming sentences in past, present, and future tenses to more specific areas that add important depth and specificity to your speech, such as comparatives and superlatives, pronoun and preposition usage, and Spanish possessives.

By the time we arrive at Level 3, the foundation has been set for a pivotal moment of growth. Building upon all that has been learned in the previous levels, our communication not only becomes far more sophisticated but dramatically expanded as well. The introduction of adverbs and coloquial phrases makes our conversations more fluid and natural, while extensive work on reflexive verbs--a very common feature of Spanish--and direct/indirect object pronouns adds a key dimension of complexity to our speech. In the end, other important topics, such as the formation of conditional sentences and the present progressive, combine with more real-world vocabulary to bring you to a serious level of competency in Spanish.

We begin by building a strong foundation in the fundamental structures of the language, giving you the tools to start communicating in the most common situations right away. We start by forming the most critical questions and imperatives, then move into expressing wants and needs in the past, present and future tenses. You will soon be able to handle a variety of situations, like ordering in a restaurant, taking transportation, shopping, and making formal and informal plans, all the while deepening your understanding of Spanish. Within these contexts, critical attention is given to Spanish possessives, masculine/feminine endings, comparatives and superlatives, and pronoun and preposition usage, to strengthen your expression and comprehension of the language.

Right from the start we begin working with powerful structures and key vocabulary that allow you to build useful Spanish sentences. By the end of only a few sessions we're already able to have meaningful interactions in a restaurant, and soon the necessary pieces for shopping, making plans with friends, getting around a city, handling basic office tasks, going out for entertainment, and making travel arrangements fall into place. It's within these types of realistic scenarios that we develop a strong base in the fundamentals of the language: from the broader issue of forming sentences in past, present, and future tenses to more specific areas that add important depth and specificity to your speech, such as comparatives and superlatives, pronoun and preposition usage, and Spanish possessives. At the end we have a strong foundation to advance from and the confidence to communicate in the most common real-world situations.

In the advanced levels of the program, we focus on enhancing the range and sophistication of your Spanish. Focused practice on irregular and reflexive verbs, coupled with the introduction of the present progressive, conditional and imperfect tenses, increases the precision with which you express action. Your Spanish becomes more natural and fluid as you incorporate indirect and direct object pronouns, specific and relative adverbs and conjunctions, and colloquial expressions. Because you already have strong foundation in the language, these advanced levels are an opportunity to vastly expand the range of your vocabulary to a variety of new realistic scenarios from making business arrangements to weekend plans with friends, from writing emails to opening a bank account, and from legal discussions to sharing family stories. With the completion of these advanced levels, you will have reached a level of sophisticated Spanish suited for traveling, working abroad, or engaging in your own community.

Moving beyond the basic sentence and question constructions of Level 1, we begin with a more in-depth look at the present and future tenses and introduce the simple past. Particular attention is paid to the complex formations of the Spanish verbs "to be" and "to go," as well as a first look at frequently used reflexive verbs. We practice the components of Spanish that are often challenging for English speakers, like verb conjugation, masculine/feminine constructions, and article and pronoun usage, ensuring a clear understanding of how each part functions. Vocabulary is continually expanded through realistic scenarios in the restaurant, taxi, hotel, bank, doctor's office, clothing stores and business settings. At the end of Level 2, you will have a strong foundation from which to advance your Spanish.