Tag Archives: Podcast

Spanish Tools, Continued

In the previous post I looked at smartphone apps and Web sites that have helped me learning Spanish. Now I want to mention some YouTube channels and Podcasts that I have used.

YouTube Channels

All Language Resources

Channel Address: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3iaeeUxWOgUXFK6kfIp_Ig

This might be a good place to start since it is pretty much a review site for the various tools that are available. Like all review sites, it is people’s personal opinions, so it takes a little time to figure out how reliable they are. I’d try a few of the free resources they recommend and see if you also like them before I would spend money on a paid site just because it came recommended. They also have a blog for their Spanish reviews at https://www.alllanguageresources.com/spanish/. Of course, they cover many languages, not just Spanish.

¿Qué Hora Es? Spanish For Beginners (Season 1)

Channel Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyLl_0d0EBw&list=PLTpetkN815Qyuc2RbC1kxxMQvxjQ3RnYG

This is a television program produced by AIB network, which appears to be based in Georgia in the United States. It is presented as a classroom-style series of lessons, with the instructor, Dr. Danny Evans, writing on a white board as he presents to material. I find this to be a very valuable addition to the other tools I use because it provides the more systematic background to the grammar of Spanish that is not so easily grasped from the smartphone apps. Lessons run 15-20 minutes each, and I try to do one every day. Of course, as a YouTube channel I can repeat a lesson, and I have on occasion taken the same lesson two days in a row just to help cement my understanding. At the end of each lesson is a brief bit of culture information as well.

Culture Alley Spanish

Channel Address: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWEXFfqwh7w&list=PL80Flen6gkH_9j4OxsDucs9mbKjl5ccvU

Culture Alley is a YouTube channel offering free language instruction in several languages, Spanish being one of them. The language courses are offered in a PowerPoint style as a series of slides with a voice-over. They are well done, and like the ¿Qué Hora Es? channel above offer a systematic look at grammar which supplements the more flashcard-oriented approaches of many of the smartphone apps. Lessons are 15-20 minutes long, and there is a little bit of culture at the end.

Daily Practice

The key to learning anything is daily practice, so my approach is to set aside some time every day to work on my Spanish. My daily schedule for this starts with the smartphone apps I mentioned in the previous posts, which will take me about 15-20 minutes. I get a daily nag on my phone for those, so I start there. Then I go to the YouTube channels above, which will take me 30-40 minutes to hit both ¿Qué Hora Es? and Culture Alley. On some days that is all I do, and it ends up being about an hour. But if I am not pressed for time I will hit a few of the Web sites I mentioned in my previous posts. I find I look forward to my daily session and that after about 3-4 weeks of work it is starting to sink in. If I keep it up for a few years I should be able to survive a trip to Mexico.

Podcasts

I listen to a lot of podcasts in general, so it was natural for me to add Spanish language podcasts. But they are not part of my daily cycle. The way I listen to podcasts is driving in a car, or working around the house. If you are going to be washing dishes or mowing the lawn, why not listen to podcasts while you do these things so the time is more productive? I also like to walk for exercise, and listening to podcasts while doing that just makes sense. So while these are not in my daily routine exactly, they are a nice supplement. Now a note on getting these podcasts : Many of them do not have an RSS feed. I got a lot of them through iTunes, which I do have installed on my one Windows machine.

Coffee Break Spanish

Web site: https://radiolingua.com/category/coffee-break-spanish/

Reviews

This is one you will hear mentioned by a lot of reviewers, and it is a good one. Short episodes of 15-20 mins. are conversational, and you get to hear words and phrases and repeat them. I think the name of the podcast is that the episodes are short enough that you do one on your coffee break, if that is a custom where you live. The host, Mark, is a Scottish man who is also the founder and CEO of the Coffee Break series. Seasons are set in levels that go from beginner (Season 1) to more advanced (Season 4). Advanced is all relative, of course, so it probably is more accurate to say it gets to maybe high Intermediate. This is also available through the Google Play store. They also have a YouTube channel.

DuoLingo Podcast

Web site: https://podcast.duolingo.com/spanish

Reviews

This podcast is a bit different from the others. It presents stories narrated by native speakers in different countries. So it is in Spanish, but they do speak more slowly than normal speech. And there is an English narrator who intercuts some material that helps explain what is going on. The idea is that you may pick up some words and phrases in the Spanish narration, then the English part helps you stay on track and confirm what you heard. They are putting out one episode a week of around 25 minutes. The first one, for example is narrated by a reporter in Mexico about his favorite fútbol star, and how he met and became friends with him.

From a Zero to a Hero

Web site: https://www.babbel.com/en/magazine/babbels-spanish-podcasts

Reviews

This is an introductory level Spanish podcast from Babbel with a student, Catriona, who is Scottish, and her teacher Hector, who is Spanish. This is very beginner-oriented, so I would recommend this for anyone starting out who does not know any Spanish (which describes me!) Babbel also has an higher level podcast for when I get to that level. Also, while I have purchased a subscription to Babbel, this podcast is free. I think it serves as marketing for their product.

Spanishpod101

Web Site: https://www.spanishpod101.com/helpcenter/getstarted/itunesfeeds

Reviews

When you read the reviews you will see a certain common view, which is that the content is good but the marketing is annoying. And I think that is a fair assessment. I think I get more out of accessing this content directly on the Web site than as a podcast because I can download transcripts and read along as I listen to the audio

Notes in Spanish

Web Site: https://www.notesinspanish.com/

Reviews

This is actually three separate collections, for Beginners, Intermediate, and Advanced. It is presented by a husband and wife team where the husband (Ben) is British, and the wife Marina is from Madrid. The focus is on peninsular Spanish and culture, and it works well as a podcast.

News in Slow Spanish

Web Site: https://www.newsinslowspanish.com/

Reviews

I mention this only because I see it praised in so many places. It is really aimed at the Intermediate or above student, so I am not quite ready for that as yet. I did note that they have two different series for Intermediate, one that focuses on Spain, the other on Latin America. I’m definitely going to be getting this when I am ready for it.

Summary

The first thing I want to repeat is that I am not claiming that these are the best tools available, or that you are guaranteed to learn with them. As a former teacher I know that the student matters more than the instruction. I aim to put in 1 hour every day using these tools, and I know that if I keep showing up I will make progress.

Second, many of these places have a podcast, plus a Web site, plus a YouTube channel, and so on. If you want to learn a language find the tools that work for you. I watch a lot of YouTube, listen to a bunch of podcasts, always have my smartphone handy, and have a web browser open in front of me pretty much 24×7, so I have picked tools that work for me. A lot of these tools are available for free, but I find the ones that I pay for tend to push me a bit harder. You decide what works for you.

Finally, there are lots of languages, and at least for all of the major ones there are similar sites, often from the same companies I mentioned here. I have seen other European languages, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, and so on. I had my reasons for picking Spanish, but I think it is a good idea to learn another language in general.

Listen to the audio version of this post on Hacker Public Radio!

YouTube Video Subscriptions

I recently had a conversation with Ken Fallon of Hacker Public Radio that resulted in me offering to discuss my YouTube video subscriptions. And since that is a good topic for Palain.com, I thought I would start here.

Although my wife and I have a Cable TV subscription, I have maintained I could give it up easily because so much of what I am interested in is online anyway. For many people that might mean Netflix or Hulu, but for me it means YouTube. This is the golden age of narrow-casting, as opposed to broadcasting, because YouTube gives so many creators the opportunity to find their own audience for things that don’t appeal to the masses. A television show needs to reach millions of people to be economically viable to advertisers who pay all of the production costs, but with the rise of services like Patreon a video series can be viable with just a few thousand viewers as long as they are willing to pay a small amount (often as little as $1 per month or per video) to support the creators. For less money than the salary of one Hollywood star, you can have an entire ecosystem of interesting videos. The ones I like might not appeal to you, of course, but that is the point. A thousand flowers can bloom in this environment.

Patreon

Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/ ) is a subscription site that lets you pledge to support creators of content. You give them a credit card they can charge, and then make your pledges. You can pledge in a variety of ways, but for these videos I typically pledge either per month or per video. At the end of the month my credit card is charged, and Patreon sends me an itemized statement of what I have paid for. Now, none of these is behind a pay wall, so you could free ride, but I’m sure no one I know would do that. If I subscribe to a series I am willing to pay for it if they ask (some of them are advertising supported).

YouTube Subscriptions

When a video series is on YouTube you will see a button under the video that says “Subscribe”. Right now that does not do a whole lot other than build the stats for the creator, but for advertising-supported series that is a good thing. But one thing it does let you do is sign up to get an e-mail when a new episode is released. To activate this feature, log in to YouTube with your Google account, and on the left side go all the way down to the bottom and you will see a button to Manage Subscriptions. Click on that, and you will see that you can put a check-mark to get e-mail updates for any subscription. I like to do that, and put the e-mails in a folder in my Gmail. I can then delete the e-mail when I have watched the video.

Vlog Brothers

The brothers Hank and John Green have created a pretty good collection of videos. They started, as far as I can tell, by sending videos back and forth to each other (Vlog Brothers), and that continues. But then they got serious and created a convention called Vidcon (http://vidcon.com/) that showcases many of the video series creators and their work. YouTube then got the idea to promote an expansion of videos and provided money to support new work from folks like them. This lead to a group of videos under the heading Crash Course (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_Course_%28YouTube%29), which is not one series but a collection of them. The first ones were World History and Biology, and then they added American history, Literature, Ecology, Chemistry, Psychology, and so on. They also have a series of science-related videos under the general heading of SciShow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SciShow). When the YouTube seed money ended, they switched to a crowd-funding model, and are currently on Patreon. They also partner with PBS Online for some of their series.

My favorite show from this group is Healthcare Triage. A doctor gives straight analysis based on actual studies, and explains which studies are more reliable and why. I guess I am a bit of a data geek, but that appeals to me. Plus, I have worked for a few hospitals in my career, and previously taught a little about healthcare economics.

Brady Haran

Brady Haran is a video producer originally from Australia who went to the UK, worked for the BBC for a period, and then decided to become independent. He has a fascinating group of video series that a lot of geeks would like:

  • Computerphile – about the history and underlying technology of computers. If you ever wanted to know about flip-flops, nand gates, and Acorn computers, this show has covered all of them.
  • Deep Sky Videos – All about astronomy, including a detailed look at the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory in Paranal, Chile.
  • Numberphile – All about mathematics, and the unusual numbers that pop up. What is the largest number described? They covered it.
  • Objectivity – A look at objects from the history of science, and in particular the collection of the Royal Society in England.
  • Periodic Videos – An award-winning series on Chemistry, demonstrating some fun experiments. Sir Martyn Poliakoff is the host.
  • Sixty Symbols – The world of advanced physics, this covers everything from Quantum Mechanics to Relativity to String Theory

Miscellaneous

In addition to the two big producers I looked at above, there are a lot of YouTube series that I love from the smaller producers. Here are some of them:

  • Alton Brown – First made famous as host and creator of Good Eats on the Food Network, Alton is known for scientific approach to cooking and food.
  • BBC Earth Unplugged – Science videos from the BBC
  • BrainCraft – The science of the brain, produced by PBS Digital
  • BrainStuff – How Stuff Works – How Stuff Works is another place that produces a number of video series, this one is science-related.
  • Candyrat Records – This label specializes in guitar music, and a number of my favorite people record for them. They very sensibly publish videos on YouTube to promote their artists, and I have purchased a number of CDs as a result.
  • Dan Carlin – Host of Hardcore History and Common Sense, two of the audio podcasts I subscribe to. On this channel is the occasional video.
  • FW Thinking – Mostly about the future and how it will be different.
  • How Stuff Works – More of a general knowledge show.
  • It’s OK To Be Smart – Another science show from PBS Digital.
  • Kurz Gezagt – One video a month on a science-related topic.
  • Mental Floss – Trivia!
  • Minute Earth and Minute Physics – Short science videos.
  • NASAeClips – Videos from NASA.
  • nature video – Science videos from nature magazine.
  • Physics Girl – Exploring physics with interesting experiments.
  • Piled Higher and Deeper (PhD Comics) – Science videos.
  • Science News – Science videos from Science News magazine
  • SpaceFrontierOrg – Occasional videos on space-related topics.
  • Takei’s Take – Yes, George Takei has a video channel. What’s not to love?
  • TheFrugalComputerGuy – How-to videos that are very good.
  • Veritasium – Another science-related series.
  • Vsauce – A quirky look at a number of odd topics. Hard to describe really.
  • Welcome to Night Vale – A video channel to go along with the audio podcast that everyone in the world should be listening to.

So it is obvious that I subscribe to a lot of science-related channels, but that is what I enjoy. With all of my subscriptions, I probably average 6-7 new videos per day that show up in my mailbox. But with so much content now available on YouTube the chances are that you will find lots of things you like, so give it a try.

Listen to the audio version of this post on Hacker Public Radio!

Review: Welcome to Night Vale

I recently discovered this podcast, though it is so popular I imagine many people reading this already know all about it. Night Vale is a fictional town located in the desert somewhere in the Southwestern United States, and the podcast is presented as a community radio broadcast of the goings on. So the format is that of a small-town radio presenting all of the usual community news, such as the PTA meetings, actions of the city council, high school sports reports, and so on. But this is a town where all conspiracy theories are true! Some of the descriptions I have seen are:

  • Lake Wobegone as seen through the eyes of Stephen King
  • NPR meets The Mothman Propechies

I am enjoying this immensely, and I think you should check it out and see if you might enjoy it as well. Each show is around 25 minutes in length, and they are released twice a month.

The web site for this podcast is http://commonplacebooks.com/welcome-to-night-vale/