Nick Boalch → Spanish → Improving your Spanish

Things you can do to improve your Spanish

Read newspapers

Reading real Spanish texts is probably the most useful way of expanding your vocabulary. Newspapers are helpful for this, because the articles are reasonably short (so you can read them when you've got odd moments here and there, if you're in the computer room and you've got ten minutes to go before a class or something like that) and because they're often about stories you know about anyway because they're on the news here too.

Lots of newspapers in the Spanish-speaking world have sites online, many of which are free to access.

For Spain: El País (subscription required for access to some content); El Periódico de Cataluña: La Vanguardia; El Mundo; ABC; La Razón; Marca (for sport, predominantly football).

For Latin America: Clarín, La Nación (Argentina); El Mercurio, La Hora, La Nación (Chile); La Jornada, Reforma, El Imparcial (Mexico); La República (Peru).

Other newsy links:

For general social and cultural context of Spain, I keep an archive of the English edition of El País going back to April 2004; it updates automatically with the new edition daily (except Sunday) at noon. This is almost certainly on dodgy ground as far as copyright goes, so the site is restricted to access from inside the Durham network. Please don't report me, I'm too young to go to jail.

Also, you can read the greatest comic strip the world has ever seen, Calvin & Hobbes, in Spanish here; . (Calvin's wisdom on exams is very apposite, by the way.)

Listen to the radio

I strongly recommend that you spend as much time as you can listening to Spanish being spoken by real people. It doesn't even matter if you don't understand some of what you hear because of unrecognised vocabulary: just listening will help you get accustomed to the rhythms of speech and give you an 'ear' for proper Spanish.

Helpfully, there are various radio stations that broadcast over the Internet. The Spanish state broadcaster RTVEhas its various radio channels online, and there are also internet radio players for Cadena Ser and Onda Cero.

If you're in to do-it-yourself broadcasting, there are a bunch of Spanish-language podcasts in the iTunes store. For those of you who've not yet given in to the iPod monopoly (and I, for one, welcome our new white-earphoned overlords), podcast.net has a listing too.

N.B. isn't the Internet great? Media & Culture people, if this isn't an utopian narrative about the facilitation of diasporic culture by new technology, I don't know what is.

Watch films

There are lots and lots of Spanish and Latin American films to available borrow in the University, both from the University Library (search in the Short Loan Collection) and from the Modern Languages Office in A58 (full list available there). Some of them are even quite good. Here's a selection of ones I think are particularly worth watching. Watch them all and make your own minds up. :-)

If you want to watch Spanish-language films in an actual cinema, about your only option is the independent Tyneside Cinema, currently in a temporary location in Gateshead (just across the river from Newcastle Central Station) while its buildings are refurbished.

Talk to Spanish people

Once again, there's no substitute for having actual conversations with real people from Spain or Latin America. Believe it or not there are a few in Durham; many involve themselves with the Spanish Society and Latin American Society (which you have no excuse for not being members of anyway!).

Otherwise, there is a fairly substantial Hispanic community in Newcastle, and lots of opportunities to get involved with events like the ˇVAMOS! Festival. Or there are two good Spanish restaurants: El Torero (on The Side) and El Coto (on Leazes Park Road, behind Eldon Square).

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Last updated: 22nd August 2007 (v. 1.3)