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.

Online Shortwave for Learning Spanish

Online shortwave is a real boon to learning Spanish.

Some sites have been particularly useful to me in improving my listening skills. The greatest site hands down is the BBC. You owe it to yourself to spend quite a bit of time poking around there. You'll find language instruction, news stories, video, photos, and tons of written material.

Another great site is Radio Netherlands. In terms of its focus on programming, including a lot of joint productions with networks all over Latin America, it is probably the best source for audio programmes. They have daily news, and weekly shows varying from science, agriculture, and Dutch news, to a very interesting "answer letters, emails and phone calls show".

Another good shortwave station online is Radio Canada International or RCI. Monday to Friday they have a daily one hour show in Spanish which is well worth listening to. Saturday there's a one hour show with highlights from the week's stories interspersed with Canadian music. Sunday is my favourite show, a listeners show similar to Radio Netherland's Sunday show. Coincidentally, the two listeners' shows on Radio Canada and Radio Netherlands team up and do a couple of shows together each year. The last one was at Christmas time.

There are other excellent sources of online shortwave programming but we'll get to that.