Are you feeling like it’s a good listening activity?
For me, podcasts were better for listening than tv, because I’m such a natural reader that I was reading the subtitles and tuning out the words, hearing “womp-womp-wa-wa-womp” like Charlie Brown’s teacher. I do this auditory tuning out in my own language, much to the chagrin of my mom and spouse.
That’s why I swapped between English and Spanish subtitles. My reading was getting real polished on Spanish subtitles, but it isn’t real-life to get written subtitles over conversations. I had to find ways to hone in on listening practice at times.
That’s why I added in a diet of podcasts, hectic real-life Spanish (think tv commercials, People’s court, radio, interviews for documentaries; all in 5-10 min segments).
With podcasts, I could find something I was interested in, listen to it twice, and rob it of vocabulary.
Radioambulante has special interest pieces. Nomads (by Radio España) was great for travel vocabulary -they travel to different world cities, and they have one about eco-traveling that gave me all the vocab I needed to sound knowledgeable about environmentalism, which seems a common topic in foreign language study & interviews.
For me, Netflix shows had their own benefits: they gave me a ton of vocabulary, visual flashcards (because “bigote” refers to that character with a mustache, and “falleció” is that guy who died in the plotline). How can you not remember vocab with such interesting story lines to attach to each new word? The subtitles were great reading practice, and grammar-in-context: Look, it’s the subjunctive! Look, it’s a double pronoun!
But for listening practice, it honestly was a struggle. A nice passive boost to that, but podcasts got me more boost in pure listening from A2 to B2, and at C1 I can start to watch the television shows without the subtitle training wheels.
Absolutely worthwhile way to study, of course, just saying you might want to find another avenue for advancing, if listening is your current struggle. The podcasts and listening activities were more egfective than TV.
Lots of news reports helped with listening at the B1-B2 level as well, they have visuals to assist, but no word-for-word subtitles, and they’re short. I can’t listen for more than 5 minutes at times without zoning out. BBC Mundo is a good quick resource of some.
Audiobooks, too. I did “30 Días to form new habits” while doing yard work and grocery shopping. Great book for commands, double pronouns, daily work words. Audiobooks of easy topics (non-fiction; self-help) will assure you are listening, and you can repeat and repeat them.
They can also highlight more useful words than the scenes focused on in a TV show, too. (TV show is more pure delightful fun though…)
That was a problem when watching dubbed CSI in Spanish. I really really don’t need to know words like cadaver and caliber and autopsy and blood trace in Spanish; more life-skill verbs like in a self-help book would be preferable. I did learn all those words from the Gran Hotel, though. (Oops!)