Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

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plant
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby plant » Wed Sep 15, 2021 12:39 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:If you plan on continuing to go through Pimsleur, I would recommend not going beyond Unit 3 (the first three units are typically modeled after Dr. Paul Pimsleur's original French course, but I believe he died before he could make more advanced levels - Units 4 and 5, made after his death, just lose their effectiveness). Pimsleur will give you confidence, automaticity with a very limited vocabulary which you can later grow, and a very good accent assuming you have any kind of ear for it.

Mixing Pimsleur with dialogues is probably ok, but I would recommend not mixing Pimsleur with other audio training courses requiring production, such as Michel Thomas, since it kind of works against some of the Pimsleur method. I would highly recommend MT Spanish after Pimsleur though, for rounding out what you've learned in Pimsleur (introductory and advanced is probably good enough, but you can do the others like vocab one if you want, it doesn't take long). This will get you used to more advanced grammar as he goes through the full conjugation system, (except maybe vosotros, don't remember, and not voseo which you won't need now anyway). I've heard good things about language transfer, but haven't used it. I think it's free though (?) so that might be a good MT substitute.

Normally, I'd recommend Assimil here, but I too had the issue where my head wanted to explode from switching between LA Spanish and Castilian Spanish. If this doesn't affect you, go with Assimil.

Now to your real question. FSI Spanish is probably the best FSI course (and best free course) ever made. It's intense though, going from Pimsleur to FSI is like going from 6th grade to college. My recommendation would probably be to listen to the dialogues now to get used to faster speech until you finish the other courses, then dive in more deeply. The dialogues are great to use with blind shadowing. Did I mention it's free?

Alternatively, there are some pretty good YT channels such as "Spanish Around", "Easy Spanish", "Why not Spanish?", etc. that have transcripts available. You'll probably start to get loads of recommendations for others once you watch a couple.

Also, you probably won't be able to find it, but the Latin American Linguaphone course (2nd generation I believe, in the brown briefcase) was one of the best courses I've ever used in any language. I can't explain why, I just really loved it. Might be able to get it on inter-library loan.


Thanks for the insight on Pimsleur. It definitely requires a fast response to get the full answer out before the narrator speaks the answer. At first I was pausing quite a bit, but I'm getting faster and my responses are becoming more automatic. I can see the value in the course. I'm using Audible for Pimsleur, and I see that MT is there as well.

Improving my understanding of verb conjugation is a priority. I was making good progress with the mini stories on Lingq, but after the present tense, I started getting confused as I felt they were throwing out too many tenses for me to internalize as quickly as I was moving along. So I ended up putting Lingq on hold with the idea to return once I understood Spanish conjugation better. The PMP books are helping, and perhaps switching to MT later, as you suggested, might be beneficial.

I've read a number of posts here prior to signing up, and it seems there are many here on the forum that like Assimil. I took a look at their online version and it didn't look like it was to my taste. The older book version with audio would probably suite me better, but there are so many other resources out there. At this time I think I'm going to use other materials.

I've looked at the FSI material. :) Not yet! Time will tell.
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AllSubNoDub
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 15, 2021 1:33 am

plant wrote:Thanks for the insight on Pimsleur. It definitely requires a fast response to get the full answer out before the narrator speaks the answer. At first I was pausing quite a bit, but I'm getting faster and my responses are becoming more automatic. I can see the value in the course. I'm using Audible for Pimsleur, and I see that MT is there as well.

Improving my understanding of verb conjugation is a priority. I was making good progress with the mini stories on Lingq, but after the present tense, I started getting confused as I felt they were throwing out too many tenses for me to internalize as quickly as I was moving along. So I ended up putting Lingq on hold with the idea to return once I understood Spanish conjugation better. The PMP books are helping, and perhaps switching to MT later, as you suggested, might be beneficial.

I've read a number of posts here prior to signing up, and it seems there are many here on the forum that like Assimil. I took a look at their online version and it didn't look like it was to my taste. The older book version with audio would probably suite me better, but there are so many other resources out there. At this time I think I'm going to use other materials.

I've looked at the FSI material. :) Not yet! Time will tell.


No worries! You're already way better informed than I was for German, which ended up costing me a lot of time and money.

Pimsleur gets a bad wrap because it's so slow (especially for some of the people here trying to learn 15 languages). That said, if you're not in a huge rush it gives you something that no other course can give you in my opinion. My German is still my most automatic language even though I don't even seek out opportunities to use it and I credit that directly to Pimsleur (planted the undying seed) followed by FSI (watered the plant). Some of the constructions and actors' voices are still magically seared into my brain somehow years later.

I thought I was "smart and efficient" and completely botched the Pimsleur step on my Spanish, so now I feel like I kind of got myself stuck in "comprehension mode" forever, even though my Spanish is theoretically better than my German.

I would suggest at least taking a look at Language Transfer, from the description it seems very similar to MT and I've heard great things. Both methods should give you an "80/20" grammar core to start consuming native content.
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plant
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby plant » Wed Sep 15, 2021 2:13 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:
No worries! You're already way better informed than I was for German, which ended up costing me a lot of time and money.

Pimsleur gets a bad wrap because it's so slow (especially for some of the people here trying to learn 15 languages). That said, if you're not in a huge rush it gives you something that no other course can give you in my opinion. My German is still my most automatic language even though I don't even seek out opportunities to use it and I credit that directly to Pimsleur (planted the undying seed) followed by FSI (watered the plant). Some of the constructions and actors' voices are still magically seared into my brain somehow years later.

I thought I was "smart and efficient" and completely botched the Pimsleur step on my Spanish, so now I feel like I kind of got myself stuck in "comprehension mode" forever, even though my Spanish is theoretically better than my German.

I would suggest at least taking a look at Language Transfer, from the description it seems very similar to MT and I've heard great things. Both methods should give you an "80/20" grammar core to start consuming native content.


Language Transfer does look good! I listened to the first couple of lessons and downloaded a number of them to listen to tomorrow. Thanks for pointing it out.
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby luke » Wed Sep 15, 2021 2:56 am

AllSubNoDub wrote:Pimsleur gets a bad wrap because it's so slow.

If you have the audio files, the Audacity "Truncate Silence / Compress to 50%" is a way to make a 30 minute lesson take only about 19. You still learn the same thing, but reviews become sort of snappy.
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:11 am

luke wrote:
AllSubNoDub wrote:Pimsleur gets a bad wrap because it's so slow.

If you have the audio files, the Audacity "Truncate Silence / Compress to 50%" is a way to make a 30 minute lesson take only about 19. You still learn the same thing, but reviews become sort of snappy.


I'm actually kind of afraid to touch the magic formula in any kind of way now. If I ever learn another European language I'm going to just do Pimsleur for 3 months and nothing else, letting it drill its tiny core vocabulary and basic sentence structure deep into my subconscious past my analytical brain.

I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.

- Bruce Lee


I love truncate for listening to audio tracks for shows I've already watched though!
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Sonjaconjota
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby Sonjaconjota » Wed Sep 15, 2021 7:45 am

plant wrote:Perhaps I can find some Spanish talk radio when I get to the point that I understand enough to make it interesting and useful.

Maybe this could be helpful:
http://radio.garden
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luke
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby luke » Wed Sep 15, 2021 11:49 am

Sonjaconjota wrote:Maybe this could be helpful:
http://radio.garden

That is the coolest site I've seen in a long time. You can surf the radio stations of the world geographically. Very nice.

Wikipedia has a web page for radio.garden

Trying to figure out what the size of the dots represents.

Don't mean to hijack, but wow!

To get back on track:
Gordafarin2 wrote:I'm a big fan of Dreaming Spanish.

That guy has fantastic videos for getting started in immersive Spanish. His gestures and circumlocutions are super clear.

Español con Juan is another good channel. It's more advanced than Dreaming Spanish. Juan has podcasts too, which may help for driving. Juan uses circumlocution too, but not as frequently as Dreaming Spanish.

1001reasonstolearnspanish.com has links to podcasts targeting learners.
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby Le Baron » Wed Sep 15, 2021 12:34 pm

Yes, I've been using Radio Garden for a while now. There are similar sites for watching world TV. Recently I was watching TV Tahiti (in French and Tahitian). There's a huge amount of free global TV. Sometimes on the radio it's difficult to find just speech, they fill up the air with a lot of generic music in English.
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Sep 15, 2021 2:16 pm

Be aware that Dreaming Spanish is Castilian and he does use vosotros. He speaks slowly and clearly enough that it should trip you up too much, just wanted to put that out there.
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Re: Early Beginner Spanish Listening Recommendations

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Wed Sep 15, 2021 3:54 pm

luke wrote:Trying to figure out what the size of the dots represents.


Big dot - more stations (within the radius).

Sample test:
Glasgow, UK - 36 stations
Ardara, Co. Donegal, IE - 4 stations.
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