Tips and Tweaks: Make Your Best Spanish Podcast by Using Less Work.

Do you enjoy listening to podcasts as much as I do? Many of us spend quite a bit of time listening to them. Today we are blessed by a proliferation of topics and an increasing number of podcasts in languages other than English.

I listen to all sorts of podcasts in four languages. There are more and more podcasts all the time. Even two years ago there weren't many in Spanish let alone Italian or Portuguese. Now there multiple directories of podcasts in more than a hundred languages.

This means that there is a lot more choice. With choice, the standards against which we measure how badly we want to listen to a given podcast tend to rise. In other words we get pickier. We listen to the best spanish podcasts we can find.

For example, over the past five or six years I have been trying to develop my Spanish listening comprehension. At first I would listen to anything in Spanish in hopes that I might understand something. I listened to topics in which I had absolutely no interest; I listened to songs in styles I would never consider were the lyrics in English; I watched Spanish language movies on VHS. Why VHS? Because DVD's often have multiple language tracks and if I got caught up in the movie, I would cheat by turning off the Spanish track and turning on the English one.

Fortunately these efforts have paid off. Now my ear is a lot keener and I can follow most conversations. And just as I can tell in a few seconds whether I want to watch a given a video in English on Youtube, I can now tell if I have any interest in a Spanish podcast's topic or whether I want to spend time listening to that particular podcaster.

In other words I am listening to many podcas, not as an exercise, but because I have an interest in the actual content of the podcast.

More and more, podcasts are being listened to by people from all over the globe. People like to listen to podcasts in their native language. However, there are hundreds of thousands of people who listen to podcasts in a language that is not their native tongue.

What does this mean to the podcaster? My guess is that most podcasters, other than language-teaching podcasters, don't realize how many non-native speakers listen to their podcasts. I suspect too, that if they are aware of this market they might not have considered what to do with the opportunity.

A Very Simple Tweak.

I listened to one Spanish podcaster who had interesting content that was exceptionally well presented. But... He ran a tuneless background music track tha, but alas, I am not a native speaker and the background sound distracted me and made it difficult to focus on and follow the excellent dialogue.

I listened to the podcast a few times as I usually do to catch more detail. However, I couldn't mentally block out that background murmur which was the same on every podcast on that site. This was a fatal flaw to my ear and consequently after listening to five episodes several times, I took it off my Listen To list and haven't been back.

This podcast could be a great podcast. . The only tweak this podcast needs in order to cast an even wider net, is to turn off the background music or at least turn down the levels on the music track.

Thus without slowing down his rate of delivery; without using simpler grammatical structures or frequent rephrasing; and without changing one word of vocabulary, this podcaster, with absolutely no extra effort could make his podcast a Best Spanish Podcast for a broader spectrum of listeners.

Best Spanish Podcast Sites: Desde el Baño

Podcasts are an excellent way to keep your Spanish skills tuned up. There are many podcasts available but for the language learner not all podcasts are created equal.

Here is a sweet little treasure. This podcast is done by an Argentinian named Sofia.

Her podcast description reads:

"La idea del Podcast es darle la posibilidad a todos los que estén interesados, de aprender el vocabulario y las expresiones más comunes de la Argentina. Para poder aprovecharlo, es necesario tener un conocimiento previo de español."

"The idea of the podcast is to give you the possibility to learn vocabulary and common Argentinian expressions. To benefit a previous knowledge of Spanish is needed."

These podcasts are perhaps most suited to advanced-intermediate (and up) learners. Although, if you slow the speed of your player*, an intermediate-level listener could probably follow the podcast pretty well.

The podcast is inactive; the last entry is dated September 30, 2007. However, fortunately for us, the site is still up and the archives are available.

Some examples of her tags/topics are:

Acentos(6), Errores(3), Fotos(6), Futbol(4), Peliculas(3), Preguntas de oyentes(2), and Vocabulario(10).

Her delivery is pretty speedy but her sentence are fairly short. She uses a lot of rephrasing and question and answer structures which make the presentation easier to follow. She speaks in full sentences and controls the level of vocabulary and slang. In one podcast she mentions that she doesn't speak as quickly as she does with her friends nor does she use slang and sentence fragments as she would with them.

The sound quality of the podcast clean, consistent and well-edited.

*If you have difficulty following the podcast, you might try downloading the file and playing it in Windows Media. You can slow down the speed and make it easier to understand.

If you like the podcasts, there are a couple of her quizzes on the Quizilla site.


I highly recommend Desde el Baño as one of my picks for Best Spanish Podcast Sites.