Best Spanish Podcast Sites: SpanishPod

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.

Featured Podcast : SpanishPod

This site features Spanish Lessons in podcast format. Each session consists of two or occasionally three speakers. If there is a third speaker, it is usually a guest. In all but the advanced level there is a native English speaker who usually explains things in English but is also fluent (to my ear) in Spanish. The native Spanish speaker almost always uses Spanish only.

This is a prolific website. There are weekly podcasts at five different levels, each with its own archive.

To date the archives contain the following: newbie (33 lessons), elementary (26), intermediate (18 lessons) , upper intermediate (13 lessons), and advanced (8 lessons).

If you dig a little you can find the Extra section. It is called Del Taco al Tango. These are in Spanish only and are very interesting.


This description is from their website.

"Del Taco al Tango is a show about the various cultural difference in Latin America; from Mexico to Argentina and everything in between! In this series, we will have guests from around Latin American sharing their slang, their national dishes, their jokes, and much more! We are trying not only to help you learn Spanish, but also to help you understand how we think, talk, and behave in the Spanish-speaking world."

PRODUCTION QUALITY

These podcasts are professional studio quality. The sound is very clean with no distractions. Each lesson has an annoying little plug for their CD lessons but is a small price to pay for the free podcasts.

NOTES

The type of Spanish on these podcasts is very clearly spoken, i.e. well-enunciated, grammatically correct and spoken in full sentences. There is little slang except to draw attention to a word or phrase. In other words this is not street- Spanish nor even the spontaneous fragmented rapid-fire Spanish spoken among friends and family.

The topics are of general interest with nothing too too esoteric or specialized. The presenters are always professional and personable and have no axes to grind.

All in all I highly recommend this site to Spanish learners at all levels wanting to improve, especially their listening comprehension skills.

Spanishpod main page

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.

What Level is Your Spanish

What do I need to learn?
Are you a beginner, quite fluent or somewhere in between? Here is a technique you can use to determine your current level of Spanish and use that information to to help yourself improve.

Rate Your Spanish
One important standard is the ILR scale developed by the US Foreign Service. It has five levels:

* Level 1 - Elementary proficiency
* Level 2 - Limited working proficiency
* Level 3 - Professional working proficiency
* Level 4 - Full professional proficiency
* Level 5 - Native or bilingual proficiency

To see details of the five classifications, you can check out the Wikipedia article on the ILR scale.
While you read them make a note of what you can and cannot do.