Keep Up with Your Spanish Over Break

Looking for ways to keep up with your Spanish over the winter break? Here are some sites  that will help you maintain your listening and reading skills until January:

News in Slow Spanish is a slowly read weekly newscast with transcript. Choose to hear peninsular or Latin American Spanish. Mouse over difficult words to see an English translation.

Radio Ambulante is a weekly podcast from npr.org that features stories from around Latin America and the U.S.

Notes in Spanish features audio and video conversations between husband and wife duo Marina and Ben, who discuss a range of issues suitable for all language levels. She is from Spain and he is from England.

Mi Vida Loca, the binge-watchable drama from BBC.com, is suitable for beginning level students. Watch the learning segments to review the grammar and vocabulary featured in each episode.

Online Resources for Spanish Students

As final exams approach, we thought it would be a good time to share our favorite online resources for Spanish students. Remember to break up studying in small chunks of time. Cramming for a language exam does not work.

Barbara Nelson’s Spanish Language & Culture site is a must for students and professors alike. It not only has lots of grammar exercises, but songs and poems that will expose you to Spanish and Latin American culture. Need more? Visit http://www.bowdoin.edu/hispanic-studies/tools/newgr/ats/. For explanations about grammar, be sure to visit http://grammar.spanishintexas.org

For listening practice, you can’t go wrong with University of Texas at Austin’s Spanish proficiency exercises or SpinTX Video Archive, which maintain excellent collections of short video interviews for language learners of all levels.

Google Translate may work in a hurry, but why not use a Spanish-English dictionary to ensure you are using the correct word for what you are trying to express? WordReference will provide you with a list of definitions for the word you look up as well as its pronunciation. They even have an app! Choose to hear the audio in a Mexican, Argentinean or peninsular Spanish accent. Be sure to check out the language forum for explanations about word usage and other help from native speakers from around the Spanish-speaking world.

Are you looking for conversation practice? Consider getting a language partner through  Mixxer

A low-tech option that never fails is good old-fashioned, homemade flashcards. Just making the flashcards helps to remember vocabulary and verb conjugations as you write them out. Then, rather than checking your phone during a short wait on the bus, before class starts or at an appointment, you can reach for your flashcards instead.