Listening to Radio ELE podcasts every day is an excellent strategy for learning Spanish, as it helps develop listening comprehension, which is the fundamental skill for progressing in a language.
Most polyglots, teachers, and experts in foreign language learning agree that listening comprehension is the fundamental skill for acquiring a language.
The base of the learning pyramid.
All skills are important—speaking, reading, writing… But listening comprehension should always be the foundation. It can be compared to following a balanced diet. There are many foods you can include in different amounts, and many trends about what we should or shouldn’t eat, but what we all seem to agree on is that we need plenty of vegetables.
Listening comprehension should be like vegetables in our diet: the base of the pyramid. To acquire a language, it is essential to be exposed to a large amount of spoken language.
Real and engaging content.
Dedicating at least 20 or 30 minutes a day to listening is an essential recommendation, but to stay motivated it’s clearly necessary to find content that interests us and sparks our curiosity. For this reason, most audio recordings in textbooks don’t motivate us at all, because the topics don’t interest us and the situations feel boring and inauthentic.
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Comprehensible input.
To acquire a language, we need to be exposed to a lot of real content, but not just any kind of content will do. It’s not enough to simply watch television, listen to the radio, or watch a Netflix series. The language has to be adjusted to our level; otherwise, we’ll quickly become frustrated.
It can be concluded that to make progress in a language, it’s necessary to listen every day to content that interests us, in a language that is both real and comprehensible. And for that, the best option is the Radio ELE podcasts