Using your iPod to Learn Spanish
CreativeU, in her “Pod People” Invade Middle School: iPods Get Kids Speaking English post makes a few interesting comments on a New York Times article about a middle-school that uses iPods in ESL classrooms.
I think the key to the program is getting the lyrics down for the students. Watching Spanish TV with Spanish subtitles and Japanese TV with Japanese subtitles helped me a lot when I was learning those languages. But without those extra clues provided by the subtitles, I got lost very easily. Once I got lost, I didn’t get anything out of watching TV.
Since CreativeU suggested we start using iPods for Spanish and other languages, I wanted to suggest a few Spanish language podcasts.
Coffee Break Spanish
Learn Spanish
Espagnol (a podcast for French-speaking Spanish learners)
RollingRs
I plan, sometime, on trying all of these out to do in-depth reviews, but that is a few months away. Also, none of these podcasts integrate music like the New Jersey middle-school in the article. However, publishing a popular music-based podcast runs into different copyright issues from classroom use.
There is a site called Musical Spanish that gets around copyright issues by sending you to other sites licensed to distribute the music online, but you can’t download Musical Spanish’s content to an iPod or other MP3 Player.
You will have to do the work yourself, but there are a number of Spanish Music Lyrics sites that have thousands of songs in their databases. It shouldn’t be that difficult finding lyrics for most popular songs.