Welcome everyone to another week of me trying to become fluent-ish in Spanish. I’m not sure about all of you, but I am finding it very difficult to find new online resources that I haven’t tried before. However, after some searching, I stumbled upon a podcast called, “News in Slow Spanish”. News in Slow Spanish is an online resource that is intended help language learners improve their Spanish all while staying up to date on current events. An interesting and quite innovative idea I must say!
Let’s begin the positives of the podcast. This resource provides new stories and current events all around the world in slow, clear Spanish. This content is aimed for Spanish learners who want to improve their listening and comprehension skills, a skill that I find I am quite weak at. Each episode covers a range of topics such as sports, politics, culture, and much more. With the entertaining host speaking slowly and clearly, it gives non-native speakers an easier chance to understand and follow along. In addition, many other resources I have explored have different categories to learn about. For example, I am extremely good at vocabulary and conversations in a restaurant setting now because almost every resource covers that. While this is important, this app stood out because it taught me vocabulary and phrases that I have not been exposed to yet. The last thing that I really enjoyed about News in Slow Spanish is the cultural insight that it brings. One of the main reasons I choice to learn Spanish as my learning journey is because I feel like love with the Latin America culture while I was traveling there. This podcast is great for learning that culture aspect, learning different types of slang while doing so. As much as I like this new resource, it was not all sunshine and rainbows.
It is with great sorrow to announce that News in Slow Spanish once again requires another paid subscription! ☹ This subscription, from what I could find, is $14.99 USD a month. For monthly, quarterly, and annually subscriptions do offer discounted rates, it is still too rich for my blood. When will these resources learn that I am a struggling university student lol. I was fortunate to sign up for a free trial and able to get the gist of the podcast. The other aspect that I wasn’t crazy about was the limited content that the hosts covered. It would be nice if they had more news stories that I was more interest to listen to while improving my Spanish.
Overall, News in Slow Spanish did ultimately improve my listening and comprehension skills. By regularly listening to these stories, my vocabulary and grammar improved giving me more confidence ability of the language.
Ciao,
Zach
