It’s widely agreed that good listening skills are critical to learning a language. Good listening skills are important when trying to understand other people. You need to understand other people and correctly hear the questions that they ask you to have a decent conversation with them.

There are many forms of listening practice. The most basic being listening to what another person says to you whilst you are talking to them. This is the purest form, but it’s not the best, for one you cannot replay what you hear over again over again until you understand it. If you ask the other person to repeat themselves they will more than likely adjust the words and sentence structure to make the sentence easier to understand.

Another traditional form of listening practice is music. This can be enjoyable and is useful for picking up set phrases. However it lacks sensible pronunciation and can contain broken up sentences which might confuse you. Movies and television programmes are better, but the nature of the dialog is often fast paced, with words often spoken directly to another actor or actress rather than to the camera.

Television news is spoken clearly and to the camera, but it is often depressing, and full of vocabulary relevant only to the news stories of that day. Radio is better, especially now many shows are available to download as podcasts. However many radio show hosts speak far too fast for the intermediate learner.

There are plenty of language learning podcasts out there, but these often end up being too simple and aimed at the overly ambitious newcomer with loose purse strings. Not to mention the fact that most are fairly boring, or on topics that whilst potentially interesting to some, aren’t overly interesting to most.

The language learner needs content which comes in a natural form, but is also clear, sensibly paced and relevant. You may have tried all of the above sources for listening practice, and been frustrated by your lack of enjoyment or satisfaction after trying them.

Wouldn’t it be great then if there was a source of Spanish listening material, recorded by mostly Spanish natives, that was relevant to the modern day, easily accessible and re-playable, and of an ideal length?

Well I’m pleased to say that I think I have discovered such a source! That being interviews with stars of ‘La Liga’ (the top Spanish football league), made available freely on YouTube.

These videos are extremely useful to a large percentage of Spanish language learners for some key reasons.

1) They are interesting. Rather than watch videos of people buying train tickets or asking for directions, instead listen to Jose Mourinho’s views on the race for the La Liga title.

2) They are of excellent quality. Clearly the team behind the videos have forked out for some pretty nifty kit, as the video and sound quality is astonishingly good. This is fantastic for the listener who wants to hear every word clearly.

3) The Spanish spoken is of a steady but natural pace. Again this a huge slice of luck for the language learner, due to the fact that many journalists are making notes whilst the interviews are going on the players and managers tend to talk fairly slowly. Extremely slowly in Mourinho’s case (he wants to ensure the reporters have time to write down his words of wisdom!).

4) The content is free, and is updated on a daily basis. Language learners need a constant supply of new material to keep them interested. Thankfully La Liga add several of these videos every single day, so you will never run out of content to listen to.

5) The players and managers speak directly to the camera (to you). This is an extremely important point. Often the dialogue between two people in a movie is fast paced and directed at one another. This can make it hard to understand at times as you often don’t see the lip movements of the actors, and many are off-screen when speaking. Here the speaker is looking directly at the camera, speaking to you, with minimal background noise present.

6) The content is of an ideal length. Each video tends to be between 1 and 3 minutes long, which is a perfect length. As an intermediate listener this is the ideal length because your brain won’t feel tired after listening to it, and you will remember most of the key points put across by the speaker. Additionally you won’t have gotten bored of the speaker’s voice, meaning replaying it 3 or 4 times won’t be tiresome.

7) The ability to rewind/pause/replay/download/change speed. Finally, the nature of YouTube and Internet video players in general mean that it’s very easy to pause and rewind a video if you want to listen again. Additionally it’s easy to listen to just certain parts of the video again by navigating through the video stream. Downloading the videos and saving them to other devices such as MP3 players, and indeed adjusting the speed of playback is also fairly simple. There will be more on that at the end of this article.

So without delay, to the videos. Here I have chosen a few of the best examples of the kind of videos that La Liga freely place on YouTube every day. You can view them directly through my site, or continue on to YouTube and browse through the many thousands of videos that La Liga have uploaded.

The Videos

First up is Real Madrid’s controversial manager Jose Mourinho, Portuguese but fluent in 5 languages. His Spanish is good to listen to primarily because it’s extremely clear, but secondly because his pronunciation seems less than perfect (his strong sharp V in vamos for example). The fact he doesn’t seem to follow certain pronunciation ideals and yet is considered fluent and worked for many years as a translator, makes me feel a little more relaxed and less pressured to always get it right.

Next up is Barcelona’s tough defender Carles Puyol, having a deep steady voice, he’s excellent listening material.

Here we have Barcelona’s play-maker Xavi, again from Catalunya. This interview is interesting as he answers one question in Catalan.

Now we have Real Madrid’s captain Iker Casillas. This video is harder to understand than the others, so you might want to follow the audio slowing down tutorial that I’ve added to the bottom of this post.

Now we have Andres Iniesta, Barcelona’s attacking midfielder. Scorer of the winning goal in the 2010 World Cup Final. Here he is talking about the supposed problems at their fierce rivals Real Madrid. This video is excellent as not only does Andres have a clear voice, but he’s talking slowly, about an interesting topic, and using fairly basic vocabulary. Perfect for the intermediate Spanish learner!

Finally we have Real Madrid’s holding midfielder Xabi Alonso. From the Basque region of Spain his accent is different to both the Madrid and Barcelona based players. Here he is talking about his sides game against Getafe.

How to make the best use of these videos

I think the best way to make use of these videos is to watch them through once, making a careful effort to understand. If you are an intermediate learner like myself, then you will probably understand most of the content, but perhaps miss certain sentences. This is where the pause and rewind buttons become extremely useful. I listen over and over again, until my brain can pick out all the words that are being said. Then I look up any verbs or vocabulary that I am not sure about in a dictionary, before replaying the video.

I know I am done with a video when I can understand it clearly enough to be able to write a transcript if I wanted to. Until that point I play it over and over again, listening hard to the one or two sentences that are often pronounced in a way that’s tricky for the learner to digest (for example in Puyol’s video when talks about the Nou Camp being full, the sentence comes out as one long sound to me, I had to listen carefully a few times to hear the estar).

Whilst gaining additional listening time and practice I also find that these types of videos enhance my ability to hear distinct accents. The great thing about having videos of well known sports stars is that you can quickly go to their Wikipedia pages and see where they were born and grew up, to gain a better understanding of which accent they posses.

How to download the audio (for listening on an MP3 player, perhaps at a slower pace)

Sites such as Video2MP3.net ( http://www.video2mp3.net ) allow you to enter the link of a YouTube video and have the website turn it into an MP3 file for you. This is extremely useful for the language learner because you can drop in links to videos with audio that you want to extract the audio of, and get back a shiny new MP3 file. The process is very simple, and as long as you’re careful not to accidentally click on the advert links, you should have your MP3 file in a matter of seconds.

The MP3 file will be downloaded onto your computer, and be in some kind of ‘Downloads’ folder, from here you could move it onto an MP3 player for example, or simply playback the file on your computer.

How to slow down an MP3 audio file so that you can hear each word

VLC Player ( http://www.videolan.org/vlc/ ) is not only an excellent all-round media player, but it has one feature which is superb for language learners. It allows you to play an audio file at a slower pace than it was recorded at, whilst ensuring that it still sounds good. This is perfect if you have a Spanish podcast, or the audio from Spanish interview videos such as the ones above. All you need to do is download VLC Player (it’s free – ensure you only install that and nothing extra), then load up the MP3 file, then click Playback -> Speed -> Slower. This has helped me out no end, especially with interesting content that was slightly too fast for me to understand at the recorded speed.

Click here to view La Liga’s channel on YouTube

I was recently asked what was the most difficult thing that I have ever done. Without doubt I would now answer with ‘learning another language’. But enough of that negativity, I will borrow Steve Jobs’ Reality Distortion Field and say that Spanish is now comfortably under my grasp.

I moved to Spain knowing nothing more than yes, no and the numbers from 1 to 5 (true story). So I very much began from scratch. Over the last 18 months I have found myself moving through certain stages. In this post I want to describe what for me are the classic stages of acquiring a second language.

1) The honeymoon stage

This is where you move to a foreign country, attempt to make friends, and naturally those who you attract into your life tend to be those who already speak your own language. You bond quickly with them and live in a bubble made up of 95% of your own language, intertwinned with the occasional simple request in the local language. This stage helps settle you into the country, and provides a comforter that you know you can always return to again in the future should you wish to.

You sign up for a basic course at a language school, which is fairly expensive, but because of this you get the false belief that your language acquisition is under control. You think it will simply be a matter of sitting in a classroom full of bronzed students for 4 hours a day, socialising in English whenever you take a break.

This stage feels good though, nobody expects you to be able to speak the language yet, but people are delighted to meet you, and hear about your bold intentions. This stage typically takes place during a summer, most of which is spent with your fellow learners going to the beach, occasionally glancing at a book of verbs.

However good it might feel, ultimately this stage is merely a means to an end, and it has to be, otherwise you end up like those thousands of lame expats who live abroad but don’t actually speak the local language, and barely know anyone who uses solely that language. Think mostly old people, who have retired. We’ll give them an easy ride though, as they’ve probably done a few years of hard graft back in the old country to pay for the villa in the Costa Brava.

As a twenty-something though, to reside in this class for more than 3-6 months is pretty poor. So you gain a desire to move onto the next stage.

2) The partial integration phase

In this stage you are actively learning the local language, quite possibly in the same school or through private one-on-one lessons. You go to language-exchange meetings, and demonstrate your stock of 10-20 familiar phrases about why you love your new country, how the people are so nice, what you do for work and also a description of your home town.

You begin to feel very good, as you are integrating to an extent, and when you tell the locals of your desire to learn the local language fluently they react with delight. You tell them that you’ve only been here for a few months, and have just started. They congratulate you on talking really well already. This stage continues for anything up to a year. Then something happens.

You realise that you always have the same conversations in the local language, you understand the grammar but not quick enough to talk in real time utilizing all that you know. You also realise that all these people who you met and told some months ago that you were new to the language, now expect considerable progress. This pains you somewhat, as no matter how much you have learnt, or how much you understand, the fact you can’t speak so well hints that you’re struggling somewhat. You begin to feel inferior to those who perhaps have had the benefit of many years of schooling in the local language previously.

You question if you are trying hard enough. You seek out books to help you learn faster. You read about the latest ‘Learn Language X With Zero Effort’ e-book online. You listen to endless language learning podcasts. Whilst your knowledge of the basics is now exemplary, you realise you don’t how to construct most of the more complex sentences that we use every day in English. You begin to feel pain and disappointment. This pain drives you to the third stage.

3) The Obsession Stage

Now you actively avoid the people who you were enjoying great times with in stage one. You also avoid somewhat those who you met in stage two, as you think you could do with a bit more practice before going back to them to prove that you have indeed learnt the language.

You now make friends with locals almost exclusively, and successfully communicate with them on most topics. However it is often with limited vocabulary and lacking advanced sentence constructions. You go out with groups of locals but again feel pain when you don’t understand much when they switch to their natural speaking pace. This problem is exaggerated in a setting such as a noisy bar or nightclub. You hear your friends talking, but can barely understand the topic let alone every small detail of what they’re saying. Just missing one or two key words affects your understanding of a sentence, which then means your hastily prepared reply is itself out of context. This creates some social awkwardness as you then attempt to fire back a reasonable comment with a dozen eyes focused on you. You feel disappointment that you’re not one of those talented language learners who seems to effortlessly pick up a new language in no time. You worry that these new friends think you’re probably a little dumb. You begin to feel a bit of a burden, rather than an interesting addition to a social group.

I bet you are now thinking, Oli that really doesn’t matter, these people know you aren’t yet totally fluid with the language, and don’t know a huge amount of vocabulary. I would disagree, outside of a pre-planned language exchange, in the real world, people are time-poor, when with their friends they want to have a good time. They don’t want to remain silent for 45 seconds whilst you attempt to conjugate the verb pensar in the preterite tense for the 2nd person plural (pensasteis – in case you were wondering). There is a time and place for practising foreign languages, and most people don’t want you to flood their life with slow responses to simple questions that offer nothing in the way of wisdom.

Stage 3 continues with you meeting many locals for ‘intercambios’ and understanding almost everything they say. However it’s at a cost, your brain is now fried, as you are listening hard for every single word. You become obsessed with your future self that can speak the language fluently. You leave social situations wishing more than anything that you were better than you are, no matter how well you have spoken.

Then one day you realise that most of the language learning material you have is rather simple. You understand it all too well for it to be useful. You listen to ‘Learn Language X’ podcasts and are frustrated with how slow and methodical it is. You moan about how you wish it was harder. Even the so called ‘advanced podcasts’ seem a bit too slow. You listen to the television news and hear every word. You find that with the right people, in the right setting, talking about most subject is now not a problem.

Then one day you pat yourself on the back and smile, realising that progress has indeed been made. The pain you experienced has transmuted itself into the drive needed to bombard your brain with enough content for it to now understand it all. Pain is often more profitable in the long run than pleasure.

Then, whilst gliding through the day with your newly appreciated proficiency, you try to say a sentence such as ‘If they had seen his face they would have screamed’ in the local language, and crash and burn, thus sending you back to the books with added frustration. (Again for those who need their daily Spanish fix: ‘Si hubieran visto su cara que habrían gritado’ – I can proudly say that these sentences are now almost doable for me in real time!)

You get slightly confused, not knowing whether to proudly appreciate your improvements, or force yourself to consume harder and harder language content. You do a bit of both. Then you slip up again and end up fantasizing about reaching the next stage, admitting that you’re not yet there. You look back and see where you came from all those months ago, laughing at your previous selfs’ inability to remember basic verb endings. Then you admire your future self, and appreciate that you just need to keep going.

4) The expansion phase

Note: I have not experienced this stage yet, but this is how I imagine it is.

In stage four, you no longer have to think about all but the most complicated of sentences. You comfortably join in with conversations with friends in the local language. You don’t speak error free, but your level is high enough that you can express yourself in a way that satisfies you.

You take an interest in real non-language learning books in the local language, and stop when you find an adjective that you haven’t come across before. You tell your friends about the odd new word that you’ve discovered. You no longer seek out ‘intercambios’, but enjoy meeting new people with perhaps different accents, and comment on how difficult they were to understand.

You also experience another phenomenon, you find that you dream in the local language, and more often than you would imagine. Not the type of dream where one word is uttered by some dream character in the local language and you wake up excited and tell all your friends about, but a proper dream where you yourself were conversing in the language.

You also find that when talking to relatives back home you forget a word in your native language, but it immediately flies at you in the local language. You fear for a moment that you might actually be forgetting your native language. Fear not however, apparently this typically only happens after you’ve spent 50 or more years speaking the local language, and critically without using your native language.

You perhaps study for a high level exam in the local language, that would enable you to teach the language should you desire to at some point. You tell people that you are still learning the language but they respond that you are clearly fluent already. At this point you have become one of them, the language barrier (why is it never called a wall?!) has disappeared. You only struggle when listening to politicians arguing on television, or old men shouting in a small village pub.

5) The end game

Note: I have not experienced this stage yet, but this is how I imagine it is!

The end game is titled as such because at this stage you forget that you are a language learner. Your focus moves onto other things, such as getting a ‘six pack’, running a marathon, learning to play the guitar or something. In other words, the local language has become such a big part of who you are, that you no longer associate as something ‘out there’, it is part of you. You pick up a newspaper to find out what is happening in the world, not to ‘practice reading a bit’. You watch a local TV station to enjoy the interviews on a chat-show, not to ‘do some listening practice’. You meet up with friends to hear about their lives, not to ‘do an intercambio’ or ‘practice your speaking’.

You might even decide to learn a different language. You don’t even think about the language when you pick up the telephone. You require zero effort to listen to anyone speaking in the local language, your mental effort instead is passed onto other things.

You perhaps teach others the local language, and only occasionally stop to look up a strange word in the dictionary. You read novels in the local language without any problems, and enjoy ironing out any very minor pronunciation issues.

I hear that to reach a level corresponding to my stage 5 takes a minimum of 8 years living in a country that speaks the language, perhaps many more for some people. Most language learners end up experiencing stage four, and feel satisfied with that. I have met hundreds of English learners who are at this stage, and it’s certainly something to be proud of, there is no shame in reaching stage four and dropping the anchor. To get from stage four to stage five requires major determination and the decision to use the language as your default language ahead of your native language for many years.

Having said that though, to move from stage one to stage two requires effort, the same with stage two to stage three. Effort over a long period of time. To make an effort once is easy, to make a big effort once a month is possible for most people. To get to stage four of learning a new language, requires big efforts every single day. Nobody will follow through with this, unless they have something else. Something which you cannot buy, nor can acquire it from reading a book, or from browsing the internet. It’s something unique to living things on this planet. It’s desire.

Desire is the coal burning away in the engine of your steam train, that pushes you onwards through continual language acquisition. Without desire, properly learning to use a foreign language to a high level is simply not going happen. There are a billion and one other things a person can spend their day doing, and without the desire to learn every single day, you will quickly move onto other things.

The big question then becomes. How do you get the desire to learn another language? For me it’s one of two things. The stick or the carrot. The avoidance of severe pain, or the chase of sublime pleasure.

The stick creates desire in people who finds themselves in another country, where they don’t speak the language, not by choice but by the need to work perhaps. Think of settlers in the United States 100 years ago who didn’t speak English. Without the language, they could not earn a comfortable living for their family. The American dream required a knowledge of English to achieve.

In this 21st century of hugely mollycoddled youths and the welfare state for those struggling to find jobs, such a stick doesn’t really exist. Countries even go out of their way to cater for those not speaking the local language.

Thus, to succeed, one needs a big enough carrot. Something so juicy and desirable that it pushes you every day to learn more and more, no matter how uncomfortable it may make you feel. Something that pushes you to put yourself in those uncomfortable positions, both socially and professionally. Something that gets you through those times when you wonder what on earth you are doing spending so much mental effort trying to make these strange noises when you already speak the world’s leading language.

Where to find a big enough carrot to drive you from stage one in a summer language school with bronzed classmates, to stage five of living a real life without even thinking about the local language, doing everything you would in your home country, without any problem whatsoever, is not a question that has a generic answer.

It is up to your own imagination, to create that carrot, and for you to have the courage to chase it.

See you in stage 5.

Recently I’ve been practising my Spanish numbers. I would typically write down a 6 digit number then attempt to say and write down that number in words. For example in Notepad right now I have written:

“233 843″

Then next to it I attempted to write it out in full without checking it and also say it out loud.

“doscientos triente y tres mil ochocientos cuaranta y tres”

I would then figure out the correct answer using a textbook and compare the two. Now this is all well and good but it took ages to check each one, and so I thought there must be an easier way, and sure enough there is. A quick Google search led me to this page on ultralingua.com

http://www.ultralingua.com/onlinedictionary/convert.html

This very clever little tool allows you to enter a number in the form of digits, then select a language and it will almost instantly give you the words that correspond to that number. I popped the number above, chose Spanish, and sure enough it returned:

“doscientos treinta y tres mil ochocientos cuarenta y tres”

Now I’m able to do 10 of these little tests in the time it took to check just one manually. Which I’m sure will get me up to speed with numbers that much quicker. Thanks ultralingua.com!

Update: Sadly it seems that ultralingua.com only allows you 10 goes of this tool each day, which is lame. I think I will write my own.

For coming up with random numbers the tool on the homepage of http://www.random.org/ is excellent. If you create your own numbers your brain is partially aware of what’s coming, so this is even better.

I came across this page with a list of Spanish vocabulary related to football. One of my goals is to quickly become fluent when talking about football, and then sport in general. I always find that learning Spanish is easier when it’s related to a subject that I enjoy.

Here’s the link:

Football vocabulary English Spanish. Vocabulario de fútbol inglés español.

Today I’d like to share some more useful sites that I have come across. These are for those who like myself are attempting to learn Spanish.

News In Slow Spanish – This site provides a weekly podcast in intermediate Spanish covering a handful of the weeks most important news stories. In addition the podcast covers some grammar, expressions and basic tips. They have just reached episode #100. You can listen to the Podcasts for free. In addition they offer a transcript with explanations for difficult words, this is where the real value lies. They charge about $8 per month for access, which is a bargain.

Live Mocha – This site is one of the increasing numerous online language learning sites. Basically speaking they provide a course which one can complete online, going from a complete beginner to intermediate. This on it’s own would be worth mentioning, but it’s not where the real value lies. That lies in the way they ‘socialise’ the site, by linking you up with others who are using it. Your written and spoken exercises get checked by multiple native speakers who are able to give feedback (both textual and audio). This is incredible valuable, especially for those who don’t live in countries where the language they are learning is spoken. A small percentage of users are extremely action orientated, meaning that you’re more than likely to come across someone who will mark your work with dedication. I have done whilst learning Spanish, and the help from these ultra motivated individuals has been invaluable.

SpanishDict – The final site for today is SpanishDict. Now ignore the silly name, and lose any initial impressions that this is just a Spanish Dictionary. It isn’t. What it is, is a large site with various offerings. In addition to a basic course in Spanish, and a large word definition database, the real value here comes in their Reference section. Here they have a lot of links to other sites, some useless, but some providing incredible value. (Go to More->Reference for that). They also have an answers section which is unique I believe, and provides a Yahoo! Answers style service for random questions about learning Spanish.

All three sites have an unbelievable amount of content available for free to anyone with access to the internet. There really are no more excuses for anyone trying to learn a language! That goes for me too.

Until next time.

Oli