Eclectic Spanish-language radio for background listening?

March 7, 2013 8:31 PM

¡Hola! I want to improve my Spanish listening-comprehension abilities before I go off to Spain this summer for a month by listening to some eclectic, non-chart-driven, at-least-partially, ideally-completely Spanish-language radio online. Perhaps something like BBC's Radio 6, Radio France's FIP or KCRW's Eclectic 24.

I plan to listen primarily as "background" music at work, while at a desk for hours at a time, so I'm not looking for focused language-instruction material, or podcasts (previous questions on this topic have been very helpful and I've got podcasts set up at home).

I've got about a B1/B2 ability to read Spanish but my listening is shot after living in countries which don't use it for a decade.

posted by mdonley to media & arts (7 answers total)

Do you want to learn Spanish from the lyrics of the songs or from the talk of the hosts? Increasing your aural proficiency works when you have comprehensible input i.e. input that is just a bit more difficult than what you can easily understand. How do you generally do with understanding the meaning of eclectic Spanish-language lyrics?
posted by Tanizaki at 8:56 PM on March 7

How about KPFK. There is a show called Global Village with Beto Arcos and others that play spanish music.
posted by i_wear_boots at 9:31 PM on March 7

Do you want to learn Spanish from the lyrics of the songs or from the talk of the hosts?

A bit of both! I'm probably better at understanding spoken rather than sung Spanish, if only because the likelihood of hearing grammatical structures I've heard before is probably higher in a conversation than a song. But music is easier to sing back to myself and repeat and remember, I guess.
posted by mdonley at 9:39 PM on March 7

Are you only interested in Castellano or will Mexican (or certain other Latin American dialects of) Spanish work for you? The reason I asked is that I know here in California, especially in southern California, there are tons of Spanish language radio stations and I'm sure some of them stream online. Here's a Rock en Español station out of Tijuana that I used to listen to. There are more linked on that site beneath it, mostly from Mexico. There are probably some streaming stations out of Spain if Mexican-flavored Spanish isn't your bag.
posted by primalux at 10:03 PM on March 7

All Spanishes are welcome.
posted by mdonley at 7:14 AM on March 8

Here is an all Spanish-language public radio station streaming out of Washington state. (I noticed after I posed my previous answer that you were looking for "non-chart-driven" music, sorry). They offer streaming on their site. The programming looks like a mixture of music shows and talk shows, NPR-like. Program list is here.
posted by primalux at 11:31 AM on March 8

Itunes has a series with a couple living in Madrid with beginner, medium, and advanced levels. Notes in Spanish with Ben and Mariana.

Voices in Español is good too. They have speakers from all over.
posted by Che boludo! at 7:08 AM on March 27