LoMásTV is an enjoyable website which can help you improve your Spanish, no matter what level you are at right now. It offers over 300 short videos you can watch… "Well, so what?" you might be thinking. After all, YouTube must have a gazillion by now. But this gives you far more language learning at your own pace, and you can immediately find something you’d enjoy watching. I can, anyway.
I’ve been using LoMásTV (which is the Spanish part of an online company called Yabla) for a few weeks now. I don’t get there every day, but I do find it to be generally relaxing and fun. Here’s how it works:
You watch a video in the upper left hand corner of your screen, as this screenshot shows. The controls allow you to pause and move around.
Just below that, you can see the words in Spanish and in English. I’m referring to the place where in this example it shows "Y en la distancia… te puedo ver" and then "And in the distance… I can see you." What I like a lot is that you can make the words of either language appear and disappear with a click.
The way I’ve been using it is to play a video first with nothing showing below. If I miss too much, then I go back and show the Spanish. If I were still not getting enough (which hasn’t happened yet, brag!) then I would either show the English or use the integrated dictionary you can see on the right side of the screenshot.
Just below the Yabla Player logo, you can see the name of the video, what country it comes from, and its difficulty rank.
What are the LoMásTV Videos Like?
With over 300 videos there now and more being added, they fall into a variety of categories.
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Many are music videos.
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There are television programs
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Some of my favorites are the documentaries.
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Pretty travel videos can feed your desire to travel… and to improve your Spanish first!
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Interviews give you a great chance to listen to people speaking Spanish in a conversational way.
Since the videos come from all over the Spanish-speaking world, you will hear a variety of accents. You can see in the screenshot above that the video there is from Colombia.
LoMásTV isn’t free, but it is reasonably priced, and you can subscribe for a month at a time or longer. There are five free videos you can watch to get a sense of the programs… my husband really liked the archaeology one. (They may change the free ones around, I don’t know.)
Who is LoMásTV for?
In my opinion, this is great for anyone who already has a smattering of Spanish, all the way up to quite advanced students of Spanish, assuming of course that you like videos! if you are a total beginner, you still might enjoy it.
I do not think it would be your primary method of studying Spanish; better to use a program deliberately designed for that. But I am a big fan of using supplementary materials, even if you don’t understand them all. Just watching the videos without doing any work would be beneficial for training your ear.
There is also a version specifically for children. See the website for details. To go there, just click on the screenshot below:
