Sweet Tea, No Lemon

In the lengthy time since my last blog post, I’ve been steadily improving as a Spanish student, mostly through reading and watching shows on DirecTV Más.
I was reading through some posts on one of my favorite American-Expatriates-in-Mexico sites (Falling in Love with San Miguel) when I came across a brief mention of a language learning [...]

Several years back, I bought Barron’s “Mastering Spanish” volume 1, which included a book and 12 audio cassettes.  It’s a good program, and I learned a lot from it.  I now know that this product is merely a commercial repackaging of the government-funded FSI Spanish Basic Course.
Great news!  This course is now in the public [...]

I mentioned the entertaining Spanish travel show “Fuera de Serie” in a previous post.  At the time, I noted that closed captioning wasn’t available on the show.  However, the last few of these shows that I have recorded finally do have closed captioning.  If you’re using this show for practicing Spanish comprehension, check it out.
The [...]

Among the many Spanish language shows I’ve been watching lately (see my last post), one of the best is “Las Joyas de México”, or The Jewels of Mexico.  It’s a half-hour documentary about various sites in Mexico, airing on HITN-TV at 7 PM Central on Sundays.  There are repeats at other times as well.
HITN is [...]

My normal DirecTV satellite TV package included a couple of Spanish language channels, Univision and Galavision.  However, I found that only a handful of shows on those two networks were interesting to me.  On a whim, I decided to head over to the DirecTV website and see what else I might could get.  They have [...]

In recent weeks, I’ve been watching a lot of Spanish language TV, and I’ve found the process to be very helpful in my efforts to improve my Spanish comprehension. On History Channel International, they run a show called “El Canal de Historia” at 7 AM Eastern Monday-Friday. The shows are documentaries dubbed [...]

Students of Spanish may be interested in the these sites that I use for practicing my reading comprehension. I generally read at least one major news story from a Spanish language newspaper site each day. I visit each and try to pick a story I will find interesting.

Mexico City’s largest newspaper: El Universal
A [...]

Here’s another useful resource for students of Spanish.
The UltraLingua Online Dictionary will let you look up English translations of Spanish words of course, but it also has a neat useful feature for helping you read entire webpages in Spanish. The site provides a “dictionary enabling” feature, where you provide a web address and the [...]

In my daily exercise of reading the top news story in a Spanish language newspaper, I find myself referring to two books time and time again. One is quite obvious. Every student of Spanish certainly has purchased a general purpose Spanish to English dictionary. However, I find myself referring to a second [...]

If you’ve followed the advice in my last post of using Mexican telenovelas to help study Spanish, you might be interested in this find.
English language recaps of telenovelas
I’m trying different approaches with the closed captioning. For example, you might want to watch through once without captions on and see how much you can pick [...]