I was wondering if anyone even bothers to use this forum anymore as I never see anything new from staff, or members. I am interested in tring to start a group for people, that would be interested in doing voice chat via yahoo messneger or something like that, to have a venue to use my new lagunage skills and maybe pick up a few new words. If this is something that you might like please lets put our heads together and maybe come up with some solution and make this a reality. Thanks Nipomipo aka Ray

Sounds like a great idea. I am just starting so once I say hello, how are you, then I am done. LOL. Guess we need a chat room for several different levels, Maybe one for each section of the lessons. Some of the sites that allow you to make your own forum have chat room capabilites. I am very interested in doing this. Please keep me informed.

We might also want to create a facebook group and get people involved that way.

An open chat room where anyone can join on here would be awesome.

Well it looks like if we are going to have a chat room we will have to do it ourselves. Since there are so few of us that are talking about it we would probably need to set up the chat room and then agree to meet at a pre-set time. I still think a Facebook page might get more interest going.

A facebook page or chat room would be great! I just joined last week and am trying to gain as much knowledge as possible.

We seem to be getting some interest in this. I suggest that we get going. First I think we need to find out if Rocket Spanish is interested in doing it or do we need to strike out on our own. If we strike out on our own,can we use the name Rocket Spanish? Seems like they would welcome the free exposure, a chat room/FB page also incures some liability as well. I will try to contact RS for some answers. My email is [redacted] if anyone wants to contact me directly.

I can't speak for the folks at Rocket Spanish, but since they have made these forums available, I'm not sure they'd be all that happy about anything that would lessen people's use of these forums. Speaking just for myself, I'd not want to have to look in two different places for discussions. And as for Facebook, I pulled out after they suddenly changed their privacy settings. I know they tried to patch up the mess they made after lots of people complained, but I no longer trust them.

I just heard from the people at Rocket Spanish and they said since they already have this forum and a Facebook page, they are not keen on putting their name on a chat room so we would have to creat a chat room ourself. I can set one up or one of you others can do it if you prefer. Just make a post and let your wishes be known.

Hi all, I have been following this discussion with interest and thought I might throw a comment or two in. My problem with chat rooms is that they seem to be open to the public at large and attract a wide range of people from those that are really enthusiastic to those that are hell bent on mischief. The other problem of course is that we are not all on the same time zone so linking up to a chat room would obviously be difficult for a geographically diverse group of RS members. Since we (RS members) are a dedicated audience with an obvious common interest it seems to me that we could start by trying to make better use of the forum that already exists. For example; suppose we undertook to communicate a sentence or two on a topical subject in our best attempt "in Spanish" without cheating ourselves and then below state in English exactly what we are trying to say. In doing this we, by default are inviting each other to review our efforts and to invite constructive criticism This should not evolve into a string of correspondence on the subject matter but simply focus on the use of the language. Comments???? Regards

I believe we could create a private chat room and monitor it to keep out the riff raff, however your comment about time zones is well put. Since there seems to be a very few us us it might be hard for even two of us to get together on a regular basis in a chat room until our number grew. I think your idea about writting a few lines of Spanish with the translation is a good one. Perhaps some of the things we could communicate could be where we live (generally), what we do and what time zone we are in for starters. I suppose we should start a new thread for this as I am afraid we have rather hijacked this one.

Hi Bubba, I'm glad you like the idea and I think your suggestion about a short review of ourselves is a good place to start. How about posting in the Spanish Vocab section since this seems logical, under the heading "Vocab critique invited."? Regards

Sounds good to me. What do we do if we want to say a word and don't know what it is. I can think of 3 things. 1) leave it blank, 2) look it up (3 use spanglish - I believe that means to use the english word. Any additions or suggestions? (I think looking it up should be done.)

I like this idea much better than a chat room. It solves the time zone problem, and it also means we don't have to deal with two different sites (the chat room and the forum). And Bubba, I agree with you that looking up the words we don't know would probably be the best thing to help us learn. I would imagine that anyone serious about learning a language would have a dictionary for that language, and of course there are also online dictionaries. And in a pinch, I guess we could always resort to English.

I suggest one other change and that is that we write our message in Spanish but do not include the translation. People reading the forum can give the translation and any critique needed. Perhaps a discussion would develop out of it. Sjkh, if you agree with all this why don't you start the first post - or add your thoughts if you disagree.

Hi all, I dont think we need to over organize this so lets just go with it and individually do what's right for each of us. My particular interest is to gain some practice with the use of the language and to gain input from linguists more competent than myself. I will start it off with a short submission under the Spanish vocab section titled " Vocab critique invited".

Hey everybody, sjkh and me have started a conversation under the Spanish Vocab section and the heading "Vocab critique invited."? Please come and join us.

I really like the idea of vocab critiquing. Why am I better at spelling in Spanish than in English? I spelled critiquing wrong 2-3 times before I got it right. ¿Español es mejor que Ingles? <----es verdad, ¿no?

Hola kless001. As you probably know, Spanish is pretty much a phonetic language: sounds are usually spelled only one way. English is not at all a phonetic language: sounds can be spelled lots of different ways. One famous example: "ghoti" can spell "fish." The gh as in the word "enough," the o as in "women," and the ti as in "nation." This doesn't make Spanish better or worse than English, just different. And a lot easier to spell.