THE MATCH.COM OF LANGUAGES

Today one of my students was so excited telling me about how she got to practice her Spanish with someone she met at a party last weekend.

‘It was awesome! I even got to use some of the stuff you taught me last week! I used the entre comillas thing (while using the international sign for air quotes) that we learned during our lesson! And he said my Spanish was so good!’

You can tell she was having a…

VEINTEMUNDOS.COM SHOULD BE PART OF YOUR ROUTINE

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I am always searching for new websites that might help my students or me with my lesson plan. Of all the things I’ve come across lately www.veintemundos.com is definitely one of my favorites.

At www.veintemundos.com  you will find an extensive collection of articles written in Spanish. Each article covers news, trends or info from one of the many countries where Spanish is spoken. Articles are well written and informative. Not all of them are going to be interesting to you but you will definitely find enough things to keep you busy and learning for a long time.

What I absolutely love about this site is that each article includes and audio, a short Youtube video, vocabulary (place your mouse over the underline words to get a translation) and extra activities. You can tell these guys have put a lot of time and work into each article.

These are perfect for intermediate and advanced students. If that is your case you can benefit from this site on so many levels. I would recommend you to listen to the audio before you read, to see how much you understand. After that go ahead and read without the audio. Finally, do the reading and the audio together. See how the vocabulary is used in context. Write some notes about the main points covered by each article. Watch the video and extend your research with additional resources online. It will take you some time to do all this but it is worth it.

If you are a beginner you can still benefit from this. Read the article first. Then listen to the audio several times while reading the article. Do not worry if you don’t understand much. Your audio skills will gain from it in the long run.

Hope you guys incorporate this into your study routine and enjoy it.

For the moment I recommend you starting with this great article about two great cities in Chile. Shannon, who lived in Chile for a while, did a great presentation about the article and her time there. I can't wait to visit.

http://www.veintemundos.com/magazines/183-en/

 

Let me know your thoughts and how this is (or isn’t) helping you.

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