Last week’s article was about  children learning Spanish, and it happens that next week’s is too.. so I thought I would do something quite different in between! And what popped into my mind was watching telenovelas, as they are called in Mexico — soap operas, we would say in English.

When we were in Mexico, we could buy DVDs in the street markets, and we got various American movies dubbed into Spanish that way, but I admit my favorites were the romantic telemovelas. I would always ask the vendors for ones that were not so violent, and then I would watch beautiful impoverished heroines, darkly handsome villians, scheming relatives, and all the rest of the complex cast of characters act out universal human stories.

Very corny at time, but decidedly good for training for my ear! Even if I didn’t get all of the Spanish in a long angry speech or in seductive pleadings, there were always the more mundane parts where I could follow  the Spanish more easily. It really was great practice. American soap operas bore me but the over-the-top nature of Spanish ones, combined with learning something, did interest me. (More than it did my husband, I would say.)

Where can you get telenovellas in the US? Ah, the vast Amazon has them, and that link takes you to a list of them. These mostly have English subtitles… you could watch them that way at first and then you could put some cardboard over the bottom of your television, the better to concentrate.

And don’t use some of the swear words you may hear a lot!