Spanish Tuesdays
As with my French post, I'm sharing what I listened to, watched, read and did in Spanish this week.
Listening
Podcasts
I've discovered quite a few Spanish podcasts of interest over the last year or so, so I tend to alternate between them each Tuesday so that by the end of the month I've listened to at least one episode of each. This week's selection was:
El Mundo al día - a 20-minute daily podcast on current affairs. I try to listen to the weekly content over the course of the day, but that’s over two hours’ worth, so I pick the episodes that interest me the most first. One of them features in the Word of the Week below.
Entiende tu mente episode 31: El experimento de la Cueva de los ladrones. 20-minute episodes with a psychologist and a coach who talk about the myriad aspects of what makes us human ‘para entendernos mejor’. This one tackles the subject of belonging, exclusion, collaboration and unity.
Song/Artist of the Week
Llorando, by Rebekah Del Rio - featured in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, Del Rio's 3-octave vocal range and crystal clear voice gives me goosebumps!
Listen and watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1-_k3qjhw0
Watching
TV
Watching TV has sadly fallen very low down on my list of priorities, but even so, I try to squeeze in 10 minutes here and there over the day. Currently I'm watching the series:
You Cannot Hide/No te puedes esconder - set in Mexico and Spain, there's a mix of accents, which is always useful. A woman and her daughter on the run, drug-traffickers, a killer on the loose, love and betrayal and more. I don't think it will be winning any awards, but it's entertaining enough...
Reading
Books
Making time to read seems to be eluding me at the moment and I'm not doing this book justice by allocating my sleepiest moments to it. Así es...
La Sombra del Viento, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón - historical fiction, gothic thriller, whatever genre you put it in, it's a beautifully-written, compelling book, and probably the author's most famous. I will definitely read more of his work in the future.
Online news
Even just five minutes scanning through the headlines is worthwhile. My regulars are:
Doing
Working out, language exchange, cualquier cosa...
Exercise
Having cancelled my gym membership during the first lockdown, I took to working out at home and have now created a daily habit (where's that halo...?) of 7-10 minutes of cardio, weights or calisthenics followed by 20-30 minutes of yoga - all from YouTube. This week's selection was:
NatyGloss Gym - Abdominales de pié para reducir cinta y aplanar abdomen en 7 minutos. A quick workout for fab abs, or that’s the idea…
DaleYogaATuVida – Una práctica esencial que debes hacer. A 20-minute mix of static and dynamic poses to stretch, open and connect with your body.
Speaking Spanish
I have a couple of South American friends that I chat to on the phone, as they live too far away to meet up regularly. But that's not really enough for me, so I created a profile on the MyLanguageExchange platform (https://mylanguageexchange.com/) to try and find a like-minded native Spanish conversation partner. Like all relationships, via this medium you won't always click with the people you contact or who contact you. I've been very fortunate to 'meet' a fantastic Sevillana (Hola María!) and we can never stop nattering during our weekly hour-long Skype calls!
Word of the week
An extra feature to discuss anything linguistically interesting or quirky.
Chocolate
This one comes from the El Mundo al día podcast (28th April, 2022) Quién es el ‘Messi del hachís’? I lived in Spain for four years in the 1990s and discovered the ambiguity of this word back then. I’m referring not to the addictive kind made from cacao, but rather from the (even more addictive) type extracted from the cannabis plant. It’s not surprising hashish is likened to chocolate, both in terms of its effects and appearance. Machine translation would have a field day with this one – just shows how important cultural knowledge and context are. Also, digitally leafing through the diccionario de la lengua española, I found the expression:
El chocolate del loro, ahorro insignificante en relación con la economía que se busca. (https://dle.rae.es/chocolate?m=form)
Chocolate anyone...?
Let me know what activities you're doing in Spanish and please share this post with anyone you think would find it of interest. Hasta pronto!