Learn Spanish with podcasts

May 20, 2007 6:54 AM

Learn Spanish with podcasts from SpanishSense.
posted by klue (14 comments total)

SpanishSense is built on the same structure that made Chinesepod so popular, and the founder has some thoughts on what he calls The Learning Revolution.

If Spanish is not your thing, try Chinese (mefi), French (1, 2), German, Greek (1, 2), Italian (mefi) or Japanese.
posted by klue at 6:55 AM on May 20, 2007 [2 favorites]

Don't forget the FSI language courses.
posted by caddis at 7:32 AM on May 20, 2007

Very cool. These podcasts have come a long way. I wish I could find an Arabic one that was like this, though. I found a couple but they flew over my head.
posted by miss lynnster at 7:46 AM on May 20, 2007

Arabic PodClass ... not much there yet, but it's a start.
posted by RavinDave at 8:02 AM on May 20, 2007

Excellent! Thanks!
posted by dog food sugar at 8:49 AM on May 20, 2007

Awesome! I've actually just started going through the Coffee Break Spanish podcasts; being only on lesson two I can't offer anything more insightful than 'it seems interesting', but I'm very happy to have more resources.
posted by jacalata at 8:55 AM on May 20, 2007

David Spencer's "Survival Spanish" is pretty good. Curiously, he doesn't appear to have a website, so you gotta iTune it or run it through google.

SpanishSense has a few rough spots that they are ironing out. It took a momentary backseat while ChinesePod got a facelift. It's still a small community, but it's growing nicely and I fully expect it to be the high watermark. Indeed, I'm a premium subscriber (technically, I'm a premium subscriber to ChinesePod, but get access to SpanishSense for a few extra bucks). Like CPOD, it's also produced in Shanghai and depending on how it's received, you can expect to see other languages added later.
posted by RavinDave at 9:12 AM on May 20, 2007

Don't forget the FSI language courses.
posted by caddis at 7:32 AM on May 20

I've actually been going through the Portuguese one and it is very very good. A continuous bombardment of dialog and a quick pace.
posted by vacapinta at 9:27 AM on May 20, 2007

Lovely; should help me a lot (especially since I'm so fond of Spain).
posted by chuckdarwin at 11:55 AM on May 20, 2007

Muchas gracias! I've been worried how I'm going to continue my spanish once I leave California and its abundance of native speakers and easy access to classes. This will definitely help!
posted by po at 12:44 PM on May 20, 2007

This will be pretty useful, thanks. I have my "Spanish for EMS Providers" book but my Spanish is so bad that it was faster (and more useful) to just point at the words in the book instead of trying to speak it.

(Hey, I tried!)
posted by drstein at 7:54 PM on May 20, 2007

Thanks klue.

Piggy-backing this with my own query:
Has anybody here has come up to a decent level of Spanish (atleast conversational) using these aids? CDs/books etc? Which tools, and what was your strategy? Just wanted to know because I find the Spanish very nice on my ears and desperately want to learn it just for the fun of it, and even joined a beginner course here in Bangalore. But the teacher was a ego-flotsam of megalomaniac proportions, and anyone who couldn't grasp their ellos from their ellas in a day was treated like shit, and so I quit in by the end of first week.

After that I've seen those bigbox foreign lang. learning AIDS, CDs etc a lot of time in bookshops, and would've almost plonked down a couple of thousand rupees on them, but hesitated because I just wasn't sure how good they were.

Though podcasts sound like a good tool, and I will definitely give it a try, but I've never been a regular podcast listener until yet. So it would help if any of you have any tried-n-tested helpful suggestions on how to proceed. I am an Indian (English, Hindi, Urdu, Marathi) and not having access to any native Spanish people here in Bangalore to practise my tongue. Maybe you can help with that too.

Muchos Gracias!
posted by forwebsites at 12:07 AM on May 21, 2007

Any recommendation for a very good spanish grammar book (either in italian or english) ? I really never believed one could learn a language without a tons of verbs, phraseals and a solid grammar foundation, so rosetta stone's and whatnot dodn't appeal much to me. I use longmans for english.
posted by elpapacito at 2:15 AM on May 21, 2007

Thanks a lot. I had just started a beginners' course in spanish, and this will be a nice complement.
posted by Anything at 2:08 PM on May 21, 2007