Lingua Llama Talkshow Bilingual Podcast

I have to say that in my opinion, the idea of a “Spanglish” podcast in which the speakers switch between Spanish and English frequently is not only original and creative, but potentially very effective and useful for certain audiences. I’ve been scouring the Internet for years now picking and choosing tools to help me improve my Spanish. I found that the most important step for me was getting to the point where I could listen to and understand spoken Spanish. The more I listened and understood, the more completely I was able to “internalize” the vocabulary, the grammar, the idioms and everything that comes along with it. But what do you do if you don’t (yet) have the listening skills to simply press play on a Spanish language podcast and listen in? Well, for me the key was context. I think most would agree that if you know the general context of a given podcast, you’re in a better position to mentally predict which Spanish words or phrases will (or might) be used. Your brain has a clue as to what is coming and will be better able to process it. With Rudy’s “Spanglish” methodology, you not only know the context of the podcast but you also know the context of the current paragraph, because part of it was spoken in your primary language. You might even be given the context of an individual sentence in the same way because the speaker switched languages to mid-sentence. The magic is that the same approach can be used regardless of which language is your primary. This could be the missing key that a learner needs to get to the point where they can listen to and fully comprehend content that is completely in their target language, and from there, there’s no stopping them. I really think that the producers of this podcast are developing something potentially important here, and I hope that they stick with it.