Coffee Break Spanish is a fun podcast that teaches conversational Spanish in fifteen minute increments. It is the winner of the 2007 European Award for Languages. The podcast is available for free at www.coffeebreakspanish.com. There’s also a forum for their listeners. Other educational materials are available for purchase on the website.
According to the podcast there are over 400 million Spanish speakers worldwide. My husband and I started listening to the podcast in preparation for a trip.
Your hosts for this podcast are Mark, an experienced languages teacher, and Kara who is learning along with the listeners. They are Scottish, and it is fun to hear their accents. Fifteen minutes is long enough to cover a few phrases. The lessons move at a good pace. Mark and Kara give lots of opportunities for the listener to repeat phrases. And I like how Mark builds on what you just learned.
So far they’ve done forty podcasts! Each podcast has a small theme like ordering coffee in a restaurant, greeting people, finding your way around town, checking into a hotel, going shopping, numbers, days of the week, airport words, following a football (soccer) game, ordering breakfast, finding a drugstore, and much more. If you have a media player you can download the podcasts and listen as you walk the dog, or drive home from work. Even if you don’t have a media player you can play the podcasts from the computer so you and the kids can learn a bit of Spanish as you cook dinner or unload the dishwasher.
The lessons I’ve heard are fun, and easy to follow. I also like that if there is something you’d like to hear on one of their podcasts you can email them and request it. I know we won’t be speaking Spanish fluently in time for our trip, but we will at least know a few phrases and helpful directions.
More on Learning Spanish
Learning Spanish – Word by Word
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