Learning a language can be exceptionally frustrating. Especially when the only times you are hearing this language is in a classroom, three times a week, for 50 minutes. You’ve probably heard your Spanish teacher tell you to listen to music and movies in Spanish since your first class in middle school. While this is good advice, it can be hard to understand music in Spanish such as Reggaeton, cumbia, or Spanish hip hop when you aren’t as familiar with the language. The words blend or maybe there is too much slang to comprehend whatever Bad Bunny or MC Solaar is saying. To that I say do not fret, podcasts are the way to go!
Podcasts are a great way to focus on comprehension, pronunciation, and cultural awareness. Why is this? Well, many podcasts are centered around a story and/or they include interview(s) that create discussions to follow. Many of the podcast recommendations that I will post below do just that. This allows you an Spanish to hear what dialogue sounds like, and understand the dynamics of conversing in Spanish. Beginner language courses can be tough because you are largely listening to a professor teach you the basics of the language until you are able to slowly lace verbs and nouns together to form a broken sentence. Babies for the most part don’t learn to walk by just watching their parents move around the house. They learn by getting up, crawling, standing up and falling over, and repeating. Podcasts can help you see how to start the sentence you’ve never understood how to form. If you find that the podcast you are listening to is far too fast, no problem. Change it to .5x or even slower if it helps you. Little by little you will notice a change in your comprehension skills!
Here you will find some podcasts I have listened to and have found helpful for different levels of Spanish learners!
- Coffee Break Spanish, it is made to help learners, but they weave in news, personal and hypothetical narratives, and history into lessons of grammar.
- Season three is when the episodes become more narrative based while the first two are focused on lessons.
- The episodes created 2019 until now are mostly narrative based as well.
- Mija Podcast, they are shorter episodes so listeners can focus on what is being said and not worry about staying focused for so long. There are lots of sounds that follow objects and words that might be unfamiliar. Less is more.
- TED en Español
- El Aeropuerto
- Españolistos
- How to Spanish Podcast
- Se Regalan Dudas