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Listening to improve your French and Spanish

Writer's picture: Cate TaylorCate Taylor

Ideally, you could improve your listening skills whilst strolling around beautiful cities chatting to the locals in France, Spain or South America, but how many of us can fit that in?

When I was studying for my language A' levels and degree, listening was mainly in the format of sessions in the language lab. Think Colin Firth in Love Actually, headphones on surrounded by other people all repeating slightly random sentences in different languages. Failing that, trying to tune in to French or Spanish language stations with my long wave radio bought specially for the purpose: a frustrating endeavour. Luckily, now it is super easy to find authentic language sources to listen to.

Here are three of my favourites.


I don't have any links to them, I only listen to their free content but find them very useful to keep my own languages up to date and to recommend to my students.


Podcasts in French, Spanish and other languages


learn French and Spanish in a coffee or lunch break

There is something for everyone here - from beginners to the more advanced. I am really enjoying their audio drama for advanced level listeners, La vérité éclate toujours.





Practise your French numbers


Learn French numbers by listening

Finally, get to grips with those tricky French numbers!

Quick, easy to access and slightly nerve-wracking if you don’t make good use of the pause button but a superb way of practising those numbers which, in a real life situation, will be coming at you thick and fast.



Spanish language podcast


Last but not least, this is my absolute favourite podcast at the moment to listen to myself.

Podcast learning Spanish in conversation

The conversations are entertaining and engaging, the level of Spanish ranges from intermediate to advanced depending on the episode, and the discussions around cultural and language differences between Spain and various countries in Latin America are fascinating. I recommend this to all my students, particularly my adult students who are perhaps thinking of embarking on travelling or even living in a Spanish speaking country.



Finally, a couple of practical suggestions:

  1. Do not be afraid to use the pause button and/or rewind.

  2. Make use of the function to alter the audio speed to a slightly slower pace.


I wish I’d had access to these sorts of resources when I was starting to study languages!


If you found this useful, you may like to read my recent post about reading to improve your languages. Click here to read it.


Cate is a qualified teacher with more than 20 years of experience teaching in schools and she has most recently dedicated her time to tutoring both online and face to face. Current and past students come from the New Forest, across the UK, Spain, Switzerland, France, Spain and Hong Kong. Cate has a waiting list for all hours outside of the UK school day but can often find space for those in other time zones or adults who are able to have a lesson during the day.


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