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

Self Assessment Tool for Learning Spanish

Learning Spanish with the BBC

For a bit of fun try the wonderful BBC Spanish section. In their placement test you answer a series of multiple choice questions. You keep going until you choose a wrong one. Then you'll get your final score plus a guide to those parts of the BBC site that might be most useful for you at your level. They have a lot of stuff. There is a course based on using video clips of typical situations and news-style listening exercises with scripts and comprehension exercises. There is a lot of help and you're bound to find lots to choose from. BBC Spanish Placement Test

Tip 1. Chores are Fun in Spanish

4 Tips on Learning Spanish Every Day.

Often we would like to speak Spanish but there is nobody readily available to talk to. We can take opportunities to speak Spanish aloud to ourselves while doing our daily tasks.

Today's tip:

Tip 1. Pick at least one daily activity and use Spanish every time you do it.

Over time I have applied this to cooking, playing my trumpet, driving, biking, washing the car, doing yardwork and housework. It takes your mind off scrubbing the floor although it would take a milagro verdadero to make it fun.

Make sure you concentrate on just one activity and keep it up for at least a few weeks. This will get you accustomed to the vocabulary and phrases associated with this task. In turn you will begin to think in Spanish, at least for this activity.

This accomplishment will give you great confidence to move on and expand your Spanish to horizontes nuevos.