If you can follow some Spanish, when spoken clearly and reasonably slowly, take a look at a site I just found recently, Spanish News Bites. I’ve got it bookmarked for regular surfing. If you want to learn Spanish online free, this should be on your list of regular stops. And if you are working with a program such as Rocket Spanish, Fluenz Spanish, Rosetta Stone, or any of the others, this is a good supplement.
On this site, you can read and listen at the same time. They do short news articles in Spanish, with words in bold, like this from a recent article there:
Crisis, desempleo, estancamiento… El vocabulario económico más temido llena los medios y las conversaciones en español. Junto a Francia, Reino Unido o Alemania, España ya está al borde de la recesión. ¿Y Latinoamérica? ¿Aguantará?
On the site, the words that are bolded show their meanings in English if you roll your cursor over them.
You can also listen to the article being read aloud in Spanish. This site is from Madrid, so on most articles you’ll hear the characteristic th sound in a lot of words that are pronounced with an s sound here. Good to get used to.
You can also download the sound file, as well as a PDF file. There are exercises you can do.
If you are a total beginner, this site would still be useful for just getting your ear used to hearing Spanish, but I think it really shines for people who already know some Spanish. The articles are categorized into levels of difficulty, but I didn’t pay any attention to that myself. I just listened to the ones that interested me. They are short enough that it didn’t gobble up much time.
My husband happens to be fascinated by archaeology, and he greatly enjoyed an article and podcast in Spanish on a particular Peruvian archaeological find.
I’m going to start using the site in a more challenging way: I will listen to the short podcasts without reading anything, and then I will look at the text to see what I got and if I missed anything.
If you want to learn Spanish online, free or not, this is a good place to keep an eye on.
