Great Adventure 2000 Presents
Items of Special Interest for Foreign Language Learning

The twenty-first century beckons us to participate in many excellent adventures. One of the greatest is that of immersing ourselves in other cultures, learning other languages, winning new friends, and gaining understanding and appreciaton of what the many different, amazing peoples of earth have to offer. Fantastic technological advances in our day facilitate all of this as never before. At Great Adventure 2000, our goal is to make available numerous free downloads of language lessons and both "high" and "low" cultural materials (as they are sometimes termed)... a small but valuable contribution, we hope, in a world that desperately needs many ways to bring people together in friendship and mutual appreciation.

In order to get moving on this quickly, our first offering will be Innovative Spanish lessons based on cartoons. These were authorized by the publisher of Condorito as a means of promoting a set of lessons based on Condorito #15 with accompanying Notas y Ejercicios and approximately eight hours of recordings by professional recording artists, enlivened by sound effects and music. The recordings were made under the direction of Padre Pedro Rubio at Estudios Salterre of Valparaíso, Chile and are now available on CDs—basically at cost plus shipping and handling.

Click here for sample innovative Spanish lessons based on Condorito
Click here for Condorito No. 15, with accompanying Notas y Ejercicios and recordings
Click here for some terrific cartoons published in 1908

Next is the booklet Planning a Foreign Language Festival and a series of tests for use at these fairs (as they are also called) in Reading, Writing, Aural Comprehension, Speaking and Culture at three levels (beginning, intermediate and advanced) for French, German, Spanish and Latin. There is always a security problem with tests, so except for Aural Comprehension and Culture, only sample pages are made available on this website. Now on CDs, they may be ordered, complete, by interested teachers, institutions, and free-lance learners. All of the tests and answer sheets, etc. can be printed out in the quantities required. All recordings are included on CDs.

Now under development are additional CDs/DVDs with lessons based on songs, cartoons, video games, and movies. Learning other languages and about other cultures is so vitally important, the process should be made as engrossing, entertaining, motivating, and effective as possible. We live in a media world today and every useful, appropriate means for instruction should be employed, including, of course, comic strips and animated cartoons. Once disdained by elite professionals, cartoons—for example—are now accepted as one of the best instructional media for learning languages as actually spoken rather than ivory tower versions of them. When accompanied by recordings, they constitute superb audio-visual aids to learning.

Click here for Planning a Foreign Language Festival*
Click here for Foreign Language Festival Materials in French, German, Spanish, Latin*
Click here for free Spanish Conversacciones (Conversación con Acción, coming soon)

*Adobe's Acrobat Reader is required. Don't have it? Click on it for a free download.