English/Spanish Exchange

Spanish phonetics – visualisation

The University of Iowa provides a really excellent online phonetics tool:
http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/spanish/frameset.html

All the sounds of the Spanish language are illustrated with animations showing the mechanics of the production of the sound, together with step-by-step descriptions.

There are also video clips of a Spanish speaker saying each sound (in isolation and also in various example words).

Free Spanish units from the Open University – OpenLearn

The Open University has available in the OpenLearn LearningSpace site a few units from some of its Spanish courses.

The units available are:

• Espacios públicos (Introductory / 20 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2439

• La historia piedra a piedra (Intermediate / 12 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2951

• Con mis propias manos (Intermediate / 12 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2610

• Perspectivas porteñas (Advanced / 4 hours)
  http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=2952

“Cool Spanish” (BBC Languages)

The BBC Languages web site has a section on slang expressions in Spanish:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/spanish/cool/

This is divided into 16 thematic sections on topics such as Food, Friends, Money, Swearwords, etc.

You can listen on the site to the phrases one at a time and read an accompanying explanation. You can also download the phrases in each section as an MP3 file.