hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3300.txt

Episode: 3300
Title: HPR3300: YouTube Channels for Learning Spanish, Part 1
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3300/hpr3300.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 20:25:25

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This is Haka Public Radio Episode 3304 Friday, May 26th, on March 2021.
Today's show is entitled, YouTube channels for learning Polish, Part 1, and is part of the series,
Languages, it is hosted by AYUKA, and in about 16 minutes long, and Karim a clean flag.
The summary is my review on some YouTube channels offering free Polish language lessons.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
And I'm going to do some more stuff about what I've been learning in learning to speak
Spanish, offering some of the resources that I have come across and giving some assessment of them.
So what I'm going to do, and it's going to take me to, episodes to do this, is to go through YouTube channels.
Now, anyone who's followed the stuff that I've posted knows that I watch a lot of YouTube channels.
In fact, I can go many days without even turning on a normal television set, but I hit YouTube every day.
It just happens to me what I like.
And so when I started learning Spanish, one of the things I did was to start looking for, well, what is there on YouTube?
You know, my wife and I have discovered that anytime you want to learn anything, there's probably a YouTube video for it.
So I went looking and started finding.
So I'm going to share with you what I found.
Now, this is all going to be about Spanish because that's the language that I chose to learn.
But you could do the same thing with whatever language you want to look at.
I have seen stuff online for all kinds of languages.
You know, Japanese, Mandarin, Chinese, Czechoslovakia, and you know, whatever you want to learn, there's probably something available.
So with that little bit of prelude, here are the YouTube channels that I am currently following and have derived some value from.
And I'm going to give you my particular opinion and assessment, which is worth every single cent you paid for it.
So with that, the first place I want to mention is something called the language tutor.
Now, that's a channel that was started by Dr. Danny Evans.
And he covers French and Spanish.
Dr. Evans teaches these languages at a school in Georgia.
And he spent some time in France when he was in high school as an exchange student and then majored in Spanish in college.
So it looks like the channel is starting to branch out a little though because I'm just starting to see videos from a woman who is going the opposite way and teaching English as a second language to Spanish speakers.
And Dr. Evans has stated that his aim is to add more Portuguese is on the list, he said.
And he is adding podcasts to the mix as well.
Now, new French videos come out every Friday and new Spanish videos come out every Sunday.
Aside from YouTube, they have an online presence on Facebook and a website.
And all of these things, I have links in the show notes. I always put all of these links in the show notes.
So anytime you're listening to one of my shows, it's probably good information in the show notes you want to check out.
Now, back to Dr. Evans. Dr. Evans did a series on AIB, which looks like a community access cable channel in Georgia in the United States called KORS.
Spanish for beginners, season one. And that's how I first encountered him.
Both that series and the language tutor series are aimed at beginners.
When I finished KORS and then started on the language tutor, the first few lessons from more review than anything because it had already been covered.
But the language tutor is being actively developed. And the Spanish playlist just hit 100 episodes.
I'm still working through them, but I enjoy them a lot and find them helpful.
Now, if you want to know more about Dr. Evans, he was interviewed on a YouTube channel called Daily Language Learning.
And I've also linked that in the show notes and you can watch the interview with the link that I've given you.
When I watched this, I learned the interesting fact that Dr. Evans is now learning Dutch of all things.
As for the content of this channel, it is basically oriented to beginners, which is fine for me because I'm a beginner.
I've made it to Lesson 29, which is how to tell the doctor where it hurts.
And to prepare for this, Lesson 28 was about naming body parts, which is kind of a necessary prerequisite.
After all, you can't say, I have a headache if you don't know the word for head.
By the way, in Spanish, that is, Tingo de la Lorde de Cabezo.
Now, next one is Professor Jason, Spanish and Portuguese.
This channel has some interesting things in it, and in particular, some very good help with pronunciation.
And then, at a certain point, he switched to a long series of episodes about answering questions that is clearly aimed at people who need to demonstrate a level of proficiency, such as for a job.
The European Union, for instance, has Spanish as one of its official languages, and has set six levels of proficiency for all of its languages, in something called the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages.
Again, link in the show notes.
But the six levels are, first, for basic user, as the lowest level, A1, breakthrough or beginner, A2, wastage, or elementary.
Then the second one, B, is independent user, B1, threshold, or intermediate, B2, vantage, or upper intermediate.
And then the C, proficient user, C1, effective, operational proficiency, or advanced, the C2, mastery, or proficiency.
So the page I've linked to can give you a lot more detail on this.
But the thing that matters here is that you might need to hit a certain level to be hired in some jobs or for admission to a university program.
Since neither of these matters to me, but as I said, the links in the show notes of it matters to you.
I won't go into this any further.
But that last third of the shows on the channel are all exam prep for if you need to be certified in an oral exam.
Now, this channel does a really good job of helping with pronunciation.
Professor Jason demonstrates clearly how things are pronounced, and then goes into the details of where you are placing your tongue, for instance, in relation to the palate or the teeth.
So I would say it is worthwhile to follow the channel up until the point where he goes into exam prep.
Now, unfortunately, the channel is no longer in active development, and the website is now showing you 404.
But the first 24 of the 38 episodes are worth your time, and since they're mostly 5 to 10 minutes long doing one a day is pretty easy.
I even watched a number of them several times to reinforce the learning.
In fact, I frequently do that with any of these channels.
In language learning, repetition is key to long term mastery.
Now, Professor Jason really is a professor. He is, in fact, the associate dean for diversity, globalization, and policy, modern, and classical languages at Missouri State University.
It's quite a mouthful, quite an interesting combination of things to put on one person's plate.
Now, the next channel I want to mention is something called Ola Spanish, and Ola Spanish has a lot of bite-sized lessons you can always fit in somewhere.
No lately, they've started to get a little longer in the 15 to 20-minute range.
Now, I've seen this a lot on YouTube channels of all kinds. The first videos are pretty short, but get longer over time as the presenter gets more confident.
Now, the producer of this channel is Brenda Romaniello, who I have also seen on the SpanishPod101.com channel.
Now, I've been liking this channel because they explain things nicely and in English, so I can follow them.
I just watched, for instance, a nice video about the cultural differences between countries.
In Spanish countries, when you're invited over to someone's house, and they offer you something like a cup of coffee, you know, like anything to drink,
you're supposed to say no. If you just say yes right away, that's considered rude.
And then you do this little dance where you say no. I say, oh, no, really.
And you do several back and forths before you reluctantly give in and say, well, yeah, okay, I guess I will.
And so this person was used to this ritual in a Spanish country, and then went to an English country.
They offered her a drink, she said no, and then she spent the rest of the evening being very thirsty.
So, you know, different cultures. It's a good thing to know.
The next one I want to mention is Culture Alley, and they have a YouTube channel, Culture Alley Basic Spanish.
The YouTube channel also offers Mandarin. Why Spanish and Mandarin are the two choices? I don't know. They both have a lot of people speaking them.
The Spanish lessons are in English, and they're slow paced. They're aimed to complete beginners, and each lesson includes some cultural information, which I enjoyed having.
After all to speak a language properly, you have to understand the culture it lives in.
And since one of my reasons for learning Spanish was to travel in Spanish-speaking countries, learning more about the culture just makes sense.
Now, the YouTube series is pretty basic, but you can continue.
They also have a website with further lessons that you build on the basic lessons on the YouTube channel.
And I was glad to have it, but frankly I found the website kind of difficult to work with.
And so it has not really been a priority for me. Every once in a while I drop in and do a lesson there, but it ends up being a lot of work.
Unnecessarily so in my view.
Now, the next channel I want to mention is something called Butterfly Spanish. And it is, in fact, one of my favorite channels.
There's over 100 videos there now. A new video comes out every week or two.
The instructor Anna is a native speaker who very patiently and carefully explains the topic.
Her latest video, as I write this, is aimed at medical people who need to talk to Spanish-speaking patients, a most timely problem.
You know, I may have mentioned in other places that after leaving the education racket that I was in for a while, I went to work for a couple of hospitals, in fact.
But the first one, St. Joseph Hospital in Ann Arbor, I would hear over the overhead speaker system periodically an announcement, you know, we're looking for anyone on the staff who speaks this particular language to help out.
You know, that usually meant that they had a patient who had little or no English and spoke this other language, and the doctor needed someone to come in and translate.
So anyway, there was a lot to be said for doing this on her channel, and so it was good.
Now, she offers, and all of these things are free, so what's the deal?
In some cases, these things are offered as kind of a marketing program.
You know, they put the videos out in order to get you hooked, and then you'll sign up for a paid course or something like that.
Anna has not done that. I like the channel enough that I made a small donation to help her keep doing the videos.
As I have said many times in many contexts, you need to support the things that matter to you.
If you use software, if you use YouTube channels, whatever, find a way to support them.
You know, I support people through Patreon, or I'll just make a donation using PayPal or whatever.
You know, people who offer these things for free can only do a certain amount, because, you know, they got to pay rent and put food in the table too.
So, the next one, Coffee Break Spanish. Like many of these channels, it's not just a YouTube channel.
They have language courses you can purchase through their website, podcasts you can download for free, and listen to on your pod blare.
The Coffee Break Network actually covers many languages, as does the YouTube channel, which is called Coffee Break Languages.
The name comes from the idea that you can do one lesson on your Coffee Break, and they even have a slogan, make your downtime, your due time.
Now, this network, Coffee Break Network, was founded by a Polyglot Scotsman named Mark, who speaks many languages, and clearly is following his passion.
The YouTube videos they have been doing, for Spanish at least, I'm not following any other languages right now, are particularly valuable for practicing listening skills.
My own experience trying to follow Spanish speakers is that they seem to talk very fast, and he lied a lot of syllables.
For instance, Kesta, ends up sounding like Kesta, and that's tough when you're jamming everything together and dropping syllables and what have you.
Now, in these latest videos, Mark, the Scotsman, is joined by Marina, a Spanish native.
They give you questions to be answered by the Spanish text, and then Marina reads the text more slowly and enunciating more carefully than the average native speaker.
With this help, I'm gradually learning to understand spoken Spanish.
My experience so far, and I'll note, I've only been studying for about five months now, as I write this, is that written Spanish is not too difficult.
You need to build up your vocabulary and learn some grammar rules like conjugating verbs, but it is not too bad.
But actual conversation is much harder, and any tool that helps you with this is worthwhile.
In fact, I liked Coffee Break Spanish so much, I decided to purchase a course from them as well.
But that's something to cover later when I have more experience with it and can review it properly.
Now, there are some other YouTube channels that I follow for this, but this particular episode has gone on long enough so I'll end it here and pick up again in the next episode.
And so, this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support free software and support free language learning.
Bye-bye!
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