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.

Tip 4. Skype, Yahoo, Jaha and Lycos

Tip 4. Skype.

If 35 cents is too much to chat on the phone to a mayor's assistant, sign up for a service like SKYPE and talk to millions of people in Spanish for FREE if the other party also has the Skype service, or very inexpensively if you call a non-Skype phone.

Some of their services you, as a Spanish learner, might be interested in are:
Skypecasts, Skype Chat, and Skype Video Calling.


The skype article in wikipedia
will give you a good overview of the services before you head for the Skype Site itself.

Other competing services are low-cost by not free such as Jajah and Yahoo. A third competitor to Skype is Lycos which has free calling but you have to put up with their advertising.

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

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.