Recommended French and Spanish Listening Media

As promised in the previous post, this post will overview select sources I’ve found to be helpful for learning French or Spanish through listening. They all offer great exposure to a lot of vocabulary words in each episode, as well as a wide variety of subject matter to listen to. If you can, I would encourage listening to many different sources even if the topics aren’t especially interesting for you – just don’t make yourself listen to something uninteresting for a long time or spend any time at all on topics or sources you find outright boring.

Below are specific sources I recommend as helpful for listening to French or Spanish – try them out, but don’t be afraid to also explore for others that you might like!

Recommended French listening sources

Le Village de Dany

-            Category: Children’s

-            Why I recommend: Medium speaking speed, commonly familiar topics and situations to provide context

Fluidité

-            Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in English, transcripts available for reading the podcast words

InnerFrench

-            Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in French, slower speaking speed, transcripts available for reading the podcast words

France24

-            Category: Newscasts and Documentaries

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, faster speaking speed and more rapid switching between speakers

Le Monde

-            Category: Newscasts and Documentaries

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, subtitles in French

ARTE Family FR

-            Category: Documentaries

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, medium speaking speed, video to provide context

Recommended Spanish listening sources

Daniel Tigre en Español

-            Category: Children’s

-            Why I recommend: Medium speaking speed, commonly familiar topics and situations to provide context

Spanish Language Coach

-            Category: Learning, Social Sciences, Cultural Interest

-            Why I recommend: Beginner, intermediate, and advanced podcasts, transcripts available for reading the podcast words, other reading resources available

VisualPolitik

-            Category: Politics and International Events

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, faster speaking speed, video to provide context, subtitles in Spanish

DW Español and DW Documental

-            Category: Newscasts and Documentaries

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, slower speaking speed

BBC News Mundo

-            Category: Newscasts and Documentaries

-            Why I recommend: Lots of interesting topics, medium speaking speed, subtitles in Spanish

Conclusion

Each of these sources has different strengths and different challenge levels. Some will be more enjoyable and useful for you from the beginning, and others might be better after you’ve developed some degree of mastery in your target language. Choose topics you find interesting to help sustain your motivation, and feel free to bounce around between different sources. What’s important is to continue learning at a sustainable pace through a reliable, effective process. Listening to a podcast or watching a video for twenty minutes each day leads to a lot of learning and progress if you are focused and make those twenty minutes high quality learning time!

As always, when listening to the news and documentaries (even in English), watch out for your source’s bias or viewpoint and how that affects the way they present information to you!

Getting Into Listening to French and Spanish

Building your vocabulary through extensive reading should keep you busy for a while. But sometimes, you might want to mix in some listening, or you might be at a point where you’ve done enough reading to feel ready to spend most of your language learning time on listening for a while. To help you succeed in listening to French or Spanish whenever you’re ready, this post will give you some good tips on the difference in difficulty of different media, keeping your expectations realistic, and how to gradually increase the challenge level of what you listen to. Specifically, this post will go over:

-            Different types of listening material that are easier or more challenging

-            Setting realistic expectations: keep learning for 20 minutes each day and get a little better each month

-            Advanced listening challenges: faster play speed, trying movies and music

Different types of listening material

Various media in a foreign language has different degrees of difficulty, not just in the complexity or obscurity of topics, but in things like the pace and clarity of speech. When just beginning to listen, it’s a good idea to listen to more formal, polished media like podcasts, newscasts, and documentaries. Music and movies are fast paced enough and have enough distracting background noise that they are more advanced things to listen to.

Another good source of listening media for beginners is children’s shows. One particular show that I recommend for early listening is Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, which has many videos available on YouTube in both French (le Village de Dany) and Spanish (Daniel Tigre en Español). The spoken language is generally very clear and not too fast, and the video component helps to provide clues for understanding the dialogues throughout the episodes.

Other listening media will also be listed in the next post, along with a simple assessment of strengths that each of these sources offers to help you become used to spoken French or Spanish. A common strength of all of them is that they will expose you to a high volume of different words (quantity, not loudness 😊) in spoken language, which is a key ingredient to mastering any foreign language.

Setting realistic expectations

As I’ve said in many posts before but cannot say too many times, setting realistic expectations is critical to the success of your language learning journey. With listening, as with reading, 20 minutes each day is plenty of time to give your brain a good workout in the language and make good progress over time. If you have time to listen for 30 minutes a day instead of 20, that’s great, but don’t get carried away with so much that you burn out and lose desire to keep learning. Focus on moderate quantity of exposure and high quality, undistracted focus with the intent of forming a habit to dedicate this time to learning well.

Regarding the pace of learning you should expect of yourself, my experience with learning to listen to a foreign language is that I notice myself getting a little bit better about once a month. Of course, I’m improving every day, but about once a month is when I suddenly notice that I’ve gotten a little better at it than I thought I was. These improvements are tiny, and it takes several of them over several months to make significant progress. Factor this into your expectations on getting better at understanding spoken French or Spanish; give yourself at least one year of listening at least two or three times per week to reach a place where you feel like you’re getting “good” at it.

Advanced listening challenges

Once you reach a point where it’s comfortable to listen to a source and you can understand it well, it might be time to try more challenging media. One other thing you can try with the existing media is increasing the playback speed, so you have to keep up with a faster pace of speech. Playing easier media at a faster speed could be a good way to segue into media like music and movies that is less easily intelligible to the untrained ear. If you know someone who speaks French or Spanish and is interested in speaking in the language with you, trying to understand their natural speech can be a good test of how well you can function in that language if you were in a French or Spanish speaking country.

Conclusions

Whether you listen to a foreign language before getting into reading, in parallel, or after you’ve read quite a bit, learning to listen to the language takes the same basic approach as learning to read it: a sustainable, reliable process that you can complete each day for weeks on end, without missing more than one or two days per month. Set reasonable expectations of how fast you will develop the ability to understand the spoken language. Don’t be in a rush and choose easier materials to start, progressing to more challenging ones as you find yourself getting better at hearing words, then phrases, then sentences, then whole ideas expressed in your target language. With patient, persistent practice, you will get good at listening to French and Spanish using a sustainable daily process that turns into a habit!

Reading Familiar Contexts in French and Spanish

As you get the hang of reading with the three-pass method and other practice, one thing you should seek for building vocabulary more easily in the beginner or lower-intermediate level is reading in a familiar context. Reading in familiar contexts allows you to figure out what a French or Spanish text is saying because you already know about the situation it describes. While you could probably find other topics you’re used to for this technique, I recommend reading about U.S. history in French or Spanish on Wikipedia; of course, this assumes you’re far enough along in your education that you’ve learned about this in English already.

Whether you are about to brush up on your American history and geography, or you prefer to find a different topic, here are three fantastic reasons to practice reading in familiar contexts:

-            Reading about a familiar subject in a foreign language uses knowledge you’ve already learned to help you increase your target language vocabulary

-            Reading about topics that interest you will both help you to stay motivated in your language learning and help to build your foreign language reading endurance

-            Reading a large volume of articles in your target language will help your brain get used to imagining the context when you read or listen to other media in the language

Increase your target language vocabulary

The way to make your target language “easy” is to practice reading and listening consistently: regularly, with good focus, moving on to new material frequently. This results in acquiring a large vocabulary in the language as well as acclimation to its sentence structures. While reading is a must for learning the sounds of the language and can be started either before or after you get into reading, reading is going to help you more with growing your vocabulary, as you can ingest the text at your pace and take time to look around the surrounding sentences for clues about a new word’s meaning; listening to the language usually doesn’t give you the time to do this before moving on.

Stick to the same routine as recommended in earlier posts: focus on making your process a sustainable one that you can count on yourself to complete day after day. Twenty minutes of reading in your target language each day will be plenty of (fun) work and you’ll learn a lot in a handful of weeks. Remember that learning a foreign language simply doesn’t happen overnight, and you should set an expectation for yourself to complete a reasonable process every day, not to become fluent quickly. If you are consistent and diligent in performing your process each day, the growth of your target language vocabulary will sneak up on you! 😊

Tips for using foreign language translation tools when you need them:

-            Thoughtfully try using context or the word looking familiar to guess what it means before turning to a dictionary

-            Translate entire sentences or passages if the dictionary, Bing/Google Translate, or other translations of a word seems odd

-            If reading online, keeping your translation tool of choice open in another browser tab can make it quick and easy go back and forth to translate unknown words as you go

Stay motivated and build endurance

Keep reading about topics that interest you! Don’t force yourself to read about a boring topic just because you feel obligated or someone said you “should”, as this will make language learning something you don’t look forward to anymore. In addition to helping you better understand what you’re reading in your target language, reading in familiar contexts can keep language learning fun because it’s reinforced by other interests you have.

Another way to stay motivated is to save hyperlinks to other pages you want to read later. If you find a link to another page you’d like to read later, pause long enough to set up a favorites folder to bookmark pages in French or Spanish that you’d like to read later. Then, get back to what you’re on now and keep plugging away, trying your best to read through the whole article for as long as it’s keeping your interest.

Learn to imagine the context of what you read

After practicing enough reading in your target language, you’ll be able to recognize enough words to start imagining the context of what you’re reading. Mastering this skill by reading familiar contexts is a great way to use “training wheels” of familiar context to build your vocabulary to the point where you can start imagining contexts of unfamiliar contexts that you have to figure out! Getting to this stage will give you a great feeling sense of mastery over the language; you’ll still have lots left to learn, but you’ll also feel like you’ve really gotten somewhere. It will feed your motivation and sense of accomplishment, and you’ll probably get curious about whether you can figure out the context of something like a podcast episode (or its transcript) on something you haven’t yet read about or listened to in your target language.

Conclusion

Reading about something you already know is a great way to enlarge your foreign language vocabulary. Understanding what is going on in general provides clues about the meaning of those one or two words you aren’t already familiar with. Choosing reading material about topics that interest you is a good idea for keeping yourself excited for daily language learning, instead of coming to view it as a chore. If you enjoy reading, you’ll do more of it, and that will lead you to increase your foreign language reading endurance. And by reading a large volume of material, along with increasing your vocabulary base and reading endurance, you’ll develop the ability to catch on to the context of more and more materials about less familiar topics.

To try this technique of reading a familiar context, here are the links to the articles about the United States in French and Spanish on Wikipedia:

-            Estados Unidos

-            États-Unis

If you enjoy reading about the United States in French or Spanish on Wikipedia, you might try reading about some of the topics hyperlinked in these articles as well!