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.

Improve Your Fluency: Don't Let Mistakes Slow You Down

Written Language
Formal written English is just one type of English. We can craft our written words into the exact form we wish. We can go back and add, change or delete things until everything is just right. However, we rarely speak formal, written English except in speeches or when making excuses to a police officer. Spoken language has different expectations. Our speech is laced with sentence fragments, false starts, abrupt shifts in topic and so on, and nobody cares. These types of errors
would be unacceptable in written language but are not really errors in spoken language; it is what normal spoken language is.

Just Get your Message Across
Making mistakes in Spanish is nothing to worry about. What matters is getting your message across, not whether you use all the right words, If you get stuck on a word, use other words. For example, if you are talking about the United States and cannot remember the word estadoudinenses to describe U.S. citizens, use other words such as "the people of the country to the south of Canada" instead.

Symbols Can be Anything
Remember that words are only symbols to which we attach and convey meaning. There is nothing sacred about any particular word. Sometimes you don't really need any words to convey a message. We can convey meaning nonverbally. Think of back catchers, gang signs and any teacher in a classroom. The same meaning can be conveyed many ways.

Extroverts Learn Spanish Faster
Act out what you are trying to communicate. Use humour, exaggeration, facial expressions, gestures, tone, pitch and pace of voice - even funny noises, to convey your meaning.

Don't try to sound like a Spanish textbook, talk like a Spanish speaker.