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.

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

What Level is Your Spanish

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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.

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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.