Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Working on your listening skills? Here's a site for you.

 
Reading Jessica's blog entry about developing your Spanish language listening skills reminded me of this outstanding web site. I find myself going back to it again and again.

From the site:
Spanish Proficiency Exercises is a compilation of brief video clips in which native speakers of Spanish from various locations throughout Latin America and Spain demonstrate various language tasks. The objective of the exercises is to provide students of Spanish with the necessary tools to be able to talk about the same topics in Spanish. In order to do, this Spanish Proficiency Exercises contains five major components. First, there is a simplified video clip. This simplified version is scripted, the native speakers talks slower, and he or she uses simpler words and less slang. Second, there are video clips of native speakers who also perform the proficiency tasks. These clips are not scripted. What the native speakers say is what they really said. Some may talk fast, others talk slow, and some have specific regional dialects.
You'll also find an English/Spanish glossary to assist you in conversing about the topics, sample sentences and short grammar explanations. Four different levels are offered: beginner, intermediate, advanced and superior. With most of the videos, you have the choice of seeing the transcript in English, Spanish or not at all.

The topics cover everyday things such as ordering a simple meal, your TV viewing habits, a typical day of activities and so on. You can also download them to your iPod.
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4 comments:

nicole aka gidget said...

wow, ¡fantástico! Es exactamente lo que necesito para ahora-- oír un poquito de español cada día, para mantener mis destrezas. ¡Gracias!

We are Little Amigos said...

another excellent resource! your blog is like a bag of tricks :)

Karen said...

@ Nicole - Sí, es un sitio super útil.

@Maribel - thanks! :)

Jessica said...

I finally got a chance to sit down and go through this site. I love it! Gracias, Karen.