Spanish is an international language and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. With approximately 400 million speakers in more than twenty countries, from Spain, with 46 million speakers, to Africa and the Americas, and millions of others studying it as a second language, Spanish continues to spread. Many factors have contributed to this expansion. One is the high birth rate in some of the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America – nineteen in all – where Mexico alone has a population of over 100 million, making it the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world.

Spanish developed from Latin, and is related to French, Italian, Romanian, and Portuguese. Many English words also have Latin roots, making some Spanish words easy to recognize.

Perhaps you already know some Spanish, but if not, here are a few expressions: sí yes , no no, not , por favor please , (muchas) gracias thank you (very much) , !hola! hello! , !adiós!goodbye!

There are more aspects to language learning than just studying vocabulary or grammar. This course is a good opportunity to learn all of them, focusing on you as a beginner and on what you want to achieve in Spanish. Its ultimate aim is to help you interact with Spanish-speaking people in a number of practical situations such as giving personal information, making a hotel booking, asking for directions, ordering food and drinks, and many others which you will be able to handle on completing this course.

Juan Kattán-Ibarra is an experienced teacher of Spanish and the author of a number of best-selling Spanish courses. He graduated as a teacher from the University of Chile (1965) and, with an American scholarship, obtained an M.A. in Education from Michigan State University (1966). A British Council scholarship took him to the UK in 1972, where he obtained a postgraduate Diploma in Education from Manchester University (1973) and an M.A. in Education from the Institute of Education, University of London (1974).