Tips for improving your Spanish without leaving home!

Learning Spanish or any other language takes time and effort. However, there is no reason to be discouraged: the results are fabulous and open up unsuspected possibilities that include interesting conversations, entire libraries suddenly open before our eyes and the possibility of accessing foreign digital content. It is precisely the latter that I would like to talk about today.

While taking classes is important and we can even learn with a specialized teacher, as on this website, it is also necessary or at least desirable to surround ourselves with a Spanish-speaking environment: everything or almost everything around us should be in Spanish, at least for a while. Nowadays, digital tools allow us to access a wide range of cultural content on all topics and in all formats without leaving home. With this in mind, we can improve our Spanish on a daily basis by listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos or reading online newspapers.

Therefore, I would like to give you three recommendations that I found very useful for learning other languages:

1) If you are going to listen to podcasts, listen to them in Spanish. If you are a beginner, it will be hard to understand and you will miss most of it, but your ear will get used to the pronunciation and you will see that little by little you will start to understand. If you are an intermediate level, you will acquire vocabulary quickly and your fluency will be rewarded. There are plenty of recommended podcasts, but I strongly suggest one in particular that I like: The Wild Project. Yes! The name is in English, but it is a program with long interviews in Spanish with all kinds of people: scientists, journalists, writers, politicians, etc. I'm sure you'll find one that interests you. You can listen to it on Spotify (or watch it on YouTube).

2) If you use YouTube a lot, look for videos in Spanish. In many cases, in addition to listening, you can add subtitles (also in Spanish) and this is very valuable because it greatly improves your comprehension (both listening and reading). Apply the same recipe if you watch movies or series on a streaming platform. In this case there are also many options, but I recommend VisualPolitik: a global political and economic news channel with videos between 10 and 20 minutes long. They also have a channel in English, VisualPolitik EN. 

3) Put your cell phone in Spanish right now! Since you already know your cell phone by heart, watching the options in Spanish will allow you to improve your vocabulary and keep you in permanent contact with the language you want to learn.

Bonus: There is a Spanish news website that does not require a subscription and is one of the most read among Spanish-speaking countries: Infobae. You can read it online, just google it.

I hope you found it useful. Remember that the best way to learn a language is to encourage yourself to use it and expose yourself to it constantly. You will get much more out of your classes if you follow these tips.

Good luck!