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Comment by dieg0 | Hacker News Reader

Would love to listen to this. But as a native spanish speaker, this is unbearable

As a beginner/intermediate Spanish learner, it's awesome. I have been listening to all 8 episodes and already long for season 2.

I'm barely intermediate (B1 by cefr) and its unbearable. The stories are ok and its probably nice to get some practice at listening. Tho when I was just starting to learn I still preferred podcasts that had less english in them.

If you're not aware of it, radioambulante.org is great.

Why is that?

They speak too slow

I would expect a native to think language learning courses are spoken too slowly for their liking. The most common complaint among language learners is that natives speak too quickly, so of course learning material will be slowed down so students can hear every word being said.

Exactly. I thought it was a great speed, and there really aren't many slow-spanish resources online which makes it hard to transcend intermediate hell.

The English sections work well to give you context for the Spanish sections. Losing track of context is definitely one of the hardest parts of listening to a different language. "Wait, I thought we were still talking about his aunt." The English also makes it more of a leisurely exposure.

Another issue I have with most resources is that there's no way to easily replay chunks of audio. I'd prefer to be able to listen to bite-sized chunks until I understand them. I built https://www.danneu.com/slow-spanish/ (the three lil pigs) to prototype an idea where you listen to a story and can prev/next/replay any sentence.

Your page works nicely. I am making the 'hardware' version, a sentence-based multilingual audio player, maybe you find it interesting:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPPzL7dZnJ9CzHblHCLtJJT...

Some more details about the software toolchain for preparing files here, the idea is to turn any native audio/video into bilingual, sentence-based materials for studying.

https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=716...

The toolchain will also prepare nice bilingual texts: http://smallworld.press/show_hn.html

There are social media links on http://smallworld.press/ if you want to be updated.

I second that.

Native English/Spanish speaker... having one paragraph in English and one in Spanish is very confusing.

It's an interesting format for a Podcast, but the written version really messes with your brain. Specially given that sometimes the following sentence translates part of the previous paragraph, but then sometimes adds additional context or continues the story.

In audio form, as a learner, it's awesome. It's like a mini pitstop for your brain. If you had 20 minutes of nonstop foreign language, your brain can lose track and be overwhelmed. They make really good use of the pitstops by paraphrasing a particularly difficult passage, adding more context with tenses or vocab that would be too difficult for the level, or to straight up define a word.

> Native English/Spanish speaker... having one paragraph in English and one in Spanish is very confusing.

Really? You'd think that with the common Spanglish practice of code-switching mid-sentence, switching every paragraph would be a breeze.

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