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Coffee Break Spanish

By Radio Lingua Network

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Podcast Description

Learn Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish, bringing you language-learning with your latte! Aimed at total beginners, this podcast will help you get to grips with the Spanish language.

Customer Reviews

i love this podcast!!

a message from mark, of Coffee Break Spanish, regarding some of the negative comments: Comments in iTunes which don't really make sense... We love receiving feedback, both negative and positive. We're delighted that the overwhelming majority of feedback from listeners is positive. However, I've noticed a few comments in iTunes recently which quite frankly don't really make much sense. Of course with iTunes there is very little one can do about negative comments, eg. I can't even report a concern about comments on the US iTunes because I'm based in the UK. For this reason, I'm attempting to answer the comments here on the site and with a bit of luck those people who posted the comments will at least understand where we're coming from. venusenvy posted that "the Scottish accent is distracting and is nothing like a real Spanish or Mexican accent". Well, yes, when we speak English we speak in our normal voices and we do come from Scotland. Sorry if our listeners find that distracting, but we all know how bad our American accents are ;) ! However, when I (as the teacher) am speaking in my Spanish accent I can pretty much guarantee that I sound Spanish. At least lots of Spaniards think so! mikerose7 points out that he subscribed and "it only downloaded the most recent episode [...] it is of no value to anyone who did not subscribe from the beginning. [...] I give this podcast the lowest of ratings." Well, I'm quite sure anyone using this site is fully aware that in fact the sequential nature of language learning is exactly what we're aiming at. By checking your podcast preferences in iTunes you can choose to download all episodes, most recent 3 episodes, etc. Or you can expand the triangle in iTunes and "get" previous episodes. All of them! A number of listeners have been pointing out that they'd much prefer us to teach Latin American Spanish. First of all, regardless of what anyone will tell you, there isn't that much difference! We use different words in English, eg. "wee", "keen", etc. from many of our listeners because we're from Scotland, but you understand what we mean and get the gist of what we're talking about from the context. Our accents are different from those of the vast majority of our listeners, and we're certainly not going to put on false accents to try to be more understood. But the point is, you understand what we're saying even though we're speaking a different variety of English from you. It's the same with Spanish. There are sometimes different words, expressions, idioms, etc. and the pronunciation does differ slightly from country to country. It's virtually impossible to try to generalise by calling it "Latin American Spanish" because the words used in Guatemala will differ from those in Peru, and again from those in Mexico. We really try to point out the major differences, eg. the use of jugo as opposed to zumo for "juice" in this week's show, and the big differences in pronunciation of "z" and "ce-" or "ci". In fact, I'd suggest that if you know that the word for "shoe" is pronounced as "thapato" in Spain but "sapato" elsewhere then you'll know how to spell it in Spanish: if you only knew that it was pronounced "sapato" then you'd quite possibly spell it wrongly, ie. *sapato, as opposed to the correct zapato. One final thing in this post. I think it's maybe worth pointing out what Coffee Break Spanish is not. It's clearly stated on the site and on the podcast feed itself that Coffee Break Spanish aims to introduce basic conversational Spanish in a non-threatening and non-stressful way. It's primarily aimed at adults and those interested in gaining a general feel for the language and enough to cope in a Spanish-speaking country and to communicate with people. We deliberately don't cover too much in any episode: there are a lot of language-learning podcasts out there which, in my opinion, cover way too much for the average learner. I'm not trying to be condescending whatsoever, but I do have a fair amount of experience teaching both young people and adults, and with Coffee Break Spanish we're trying to provide something that listeners can learn from, even if they only listen to the show once a week. Equally, we hope it's not too hard going to listen again over the course of the week, but that's why we introduced our bonus podcast which goes over the same vocabulary, but uses alternative methods to do so. It's not meant as a replacement for the Spanish courses young people are doing in school: if it helps, great, but it's not meant to replace them. It's equally deliberately avoiding lots of heavy grammar: I've been introducing grammar rules very gradually and I think that this is undoubtedly the best way to do so and ensure that people aren't being put off. When we first started Coffee Break Spanish we tried to make it very obvious what kind of course it is. Even the very title of the show hopefully suggests that this is "language learning without the stress" and something which will let you see benefits with minimal input from you as the learner. Who knows, in the future we may well develop another series where we're covering aspects of grammar in much more detail, or dealing with particular regional varieties of Spanish, or even particular types of language, but at the end of the day we've settled on a formula which seems to work for many listeners. I'd really like your feedback on this. If it's not clear what we're trying to do with Coffee Break Spanish then let me know by posting a comment here. I'm happy to accept criticism!!! Equally, if anyone feels that they'd be willing to post a comment based on what i've said here on the US version of iTunes then please feel free because I can't do so, since I'm based in the UK! I'm really sorry if this sounds like a rant, but it's the only way of trying to get this information over to our listeners. I hope you are continuing to enjoy Coffee Break Spanish!

Very good, but still room for growth

I think the style used makes learning Spanish very easy. It is very entertaining as well. Two problems, though. I think that use of the Spanish mainland dialect is a mistake, because the accents are more difficult, and Spaniards probably only make up slightly more than 10% of Spanish speakers. I would also like less review. Everyone can listen to a previous lesson as much as they would like. No need to dwell on previous lessons! Lastly, Mark and Kara have great chemistry together.

This is GREAT!!!

I wanted to learn spanish because I work at a school that has lots of spanish speaking students. It is amazing how much I learned in just 10 minutes!! My students are amazed! Please keep this up!

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