Learning Spanish on iTunes

Today, with an iPod or other mp3 player, it’s possible to listen to music and other audio content just about anywhere. In this article, I’m going to talk about how to use that ability to work on and improve your Spanish.

There are plenty of places other than Itunes to get music online. In fact, I typically prefer to buy music from Amazon rather than Itunes because the prices are often cheaper and because the mp3s come without obnoxious DRM restrictions. All of the resources I’m recommending — mp3s, podcasts, videos, and audiobooks are available elsewhere on the Internet.

That said, iTunes does the best job I’ve seen of integrating all of these resources, making them easily available and offering the greatest overall selection of Spanish-language materials.

Here’s what I’ve found so far:

Music: As I discussed earlier, YouTube is currently my main portal to finding new music. I don’t feel a need to buy every song I listen to more than once, but if I’m coming back to a song after a couple of weeks, I like to pay for it. Itunes, along with Amazon’s mp3 department, are two locations to easily purchase albums and single tracks, and support the work of Latin artists.

Plaza Sesamo (Sesame Street): iTunes has about 3 1/2 free hours of Sesame Street videos in Spanish in their videos section (look for “Aprende con Sesame”).

Free Podcasts: iTunes has dozens of free podcasts in Spanish, on topics ranging from home repair, to current events, to Latin music, to comedy. There are a few “Learn Spanish” podcasts geared toward beginning learners, but I’ve found that Spanish language podcasts for native speakers have been enjoyable and useful as well. Some of my favorites:

• Latin Roll, Rock en tu idioma: This 2 1/2 hour weekly podcast features new music from throughout Latin America, as well as news and interviews with various bands (podcasts, videos and other material are also at Latin-Roll.com).
• La Matinal: This is a daily half-hour NPR news program broadcast from Europe. Great, high-quality news with an international focus.

Spanish audiobooks: This is one area where iTunes still outshines Amazon in terms of price and selection. Spanish audiobooks are another great way to learn or relearn Spanish. iTunes’ selection ranges from The South Beach Diet to Don Quixote. I’ve particularly benefitted from Cuentos de Los Hermanos Grimm (Stories from the Brothers Grimm) and Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer), both of which I knew beforehand, which was an immense help to my comprehension. If iTunes doesn’t have what you want, audible.com is another resource.

Audio Learning Programs: There are audio-based programs to learn Spanish, both as audiobooks for purchase and as free downloads (Spanish 101 from DePaul University, in iTunes’ University section. I don’t have any direct experience with these resources, but if other people have experience with them, I’d be glad to hear about it.

Listen, Listen, Listen

A couple of posts back, I wrote about the importance of committing time and energy to any effort to improve your Spanish. The good news is that it’s easy to incorporate audio material into your daily routine: You can put Latin music in the CD player of your car or tune into a Spanish-language radio station on your way to work, and with a mp3 player, you can listen to music as you clean house, go for walks or exercise.

Of all these activities, walking is my favorite for listening. There’s moving scenery and just enough physical activity to keep me engaged, but not enough to distract my mind. And walking functions as a great source of exercise to boot! A few years ago I had a job a couple of miles from home, and every day after taking the bus to work, I’d break out my Ipod loaded with Juanes and El Koala, walk down main street and take a long path through the woods to home. Good times.

Learning Spanish on YouTube

Learning Spanish (or any foreign language) can be as easy as opening an Internet browser.

The full potential of the Internet for learning is pretty awesome. Sites like LiveMocha offer online chat groups and social networking to allow users to meet and practice with each other. You can find and order textbooks online, access posted college lectures and learning materials, and tune into online radio programs.

But the site that I’ve used most often to practice my Spanish has been YouTube, where for the past four years I’ve been learning and relearning Spanish by listening to music from throughout Spain and Latin America.

There’s an intimidating amount of diversity to music from these regions. YouTube allows you to access this diverse pool anytime, and if you’re brave enough to venture in, the rewards can be wonderful.

I’ve found three advantages by learning a language through its music:

• If you can find a genre or artist you like, you’ll enjoy listening to it, and be more likely to make a habit of listening
• You can listen to music everywhere, making it easy to incorporate music into your daily routine
• Listening to a song works well for language learners of all levels: beginners can try to pick out individual words and then work on understanding the chorus, while more advanced learners can work on understanding the verses line by line (searching for “letras,” or lyrics, can help you find the words to a song).

To help get you started, here are a few videos that I’ve enjoyed that have (relatively) simple lyrics. (You may also want to check out my  “awesome music around the world” series, which has music from Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries.

Manu Chao – Me Gustas Tu

Elmo – Es Musica

Kumbia All Starz – Speedy Gonzales

Does anyone else have any ways they’ve used YouTube or other online resources to learn a new language?

Learning (or relearning) a new language

You don’t need classes to learn (or relearn) a foreign language.

I’ve been studying and practicing Spanish on my own for the past four years. Since then, I’ve gone from reading Dr. Seuss with difficulty to finishing Cien Años de Soledad, and have gone from having difficulty pronouncing basic words to being able to comfortably converse in Spanish while traveling to Uruguay for work and Nicaragua for pleasure.

While I’m not particularly great with foreign languages, I’m proud of my progress. Over my next few blog entries, I’ll discuss how you can learn Spanish with a library card, a mp3 player, and an Internet connection.

I’ve benefitted from the a set of audio lessons as a review of the basics, but learning on my own has taken me farther and deeper than that or any other packaged learning program (I’ve tried several, which have ranged from decent to awful).

Parts of the strategy I’ll be setting out over my next few entries should apply pretty well to any foreign language, but similarities between Spanish and English, and the convenience of Spanish-language materials and Spanish-speaking people in the U.S. make this a lot easier, though French would probably be relatively easy as well.

Here are a few tips for starting out:

Preparation
If there’s one tip I can offer with confidence, it is to commit yourself. Learning a foreign language is a lot like exercise. The benefits are great, but they only last as long as you commit the time.

If you want to be able to speak Spanish well five years from now, you’re going to need to practice every week (or nearly every week) for the next five years.

I estimate that I need two to three hours a week of practice to steadily improve, and 60 to 90 minutes to not lose anything. That said, there are ways to work on your Spanish (listening, not reading) while doing other activities such as driving or exercising: I’ll discuss some of those methods shortly.

Learn (or re-learn) the basics
I really benefited by having the basic rules of grammar and conjugation down. Learning Spanish is relatively easy compared to some other foreign languages because almost all of the tenses match.

Fortunately, my local library had an old copy of the “Living Language” Spanish lessons on CDs; by listening to these and practicing again and again for weeks, I was able to gradually build vocabulary and re-learn the verb conjugations.

Has anyone else had a similar experience or have any tips you’d like to share?

Read about learning Spanish on YouTube.