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Radio

Posted on April 24, 2007
Filed Under Expat Tips, Culture | 4 Comments

Learning a new language is tough. What nobody told me was that once I learned it I would need to keep using it in order to maintain fluency. I grew up speaking Portuguese as my only language until I was twenty-five. In spite of that, in less than five years living abroad my conversational abilities in my native language were already suffering. Granted, I was busy learning other languages and did not speak any Portuguese in my daily life. But still, I was quite annoyed to discover I had to struggle to find the mot juste in my own language. I had to face the fact that the “you only use ten percent of your brain” thing was a big, fat lie. Later in life, other languages, learned at great personal sacrifice, would also slowly shrink to “emergency-use-only” state after a period of disuse. I guess the lesson learned is: use it or lose it.

If you once knew some Spanish and have not used it in a while, here’s some friendly advice: give it some attention. A great way to accomplish this without too much effort (while waiting for the real-life immersion opportunity to present itself) is to watch Latin American TV, or listen to Uruguayan radio. To my taste, radio is easier and better since you can do other things while you listen.

Before the Internet, one needed to buy expensive short wave radios and live with poor reception and interference in order to listen to foreign language broadcasts. Fortunately, today there are thousands of radio stations in every country of the world stream-casting through the web. Uruguay, of course, is one of those countries.

Even though many stations throughout Uruguay broadcast live via the web, few are consistently good for the purpose of learning and practicing Spanish. My favorites are Radio Nacional, Radio Espectador and Radio Montecarlo. I like that they play very little music and instead, just talk. The programming is interesting most of the time, but can become boring at times (and super boring when they discuss soccer). Radio Espectador has the best sound quality, by far, but you’ll need the Real Player. Radio Nacional has interesting programming in the evening, but is plagued with frequent outages in their streaming server, sometimes for days at a time. I normally tune in to Radio Montecarlo only when the programming on the other two chases me away. It is not that it is bad, but I like the others better.

To make this language learning practice session convenient, I connected an RF Wireless headphone to the computer at home so I can roam around the house listening to Uruguayan radio. A while back, I was able to find a Phillips wireless headphone at Target for fifty dollars. They could be even cheaper now. If you have a laptop, you may want to investigate using a Bluetooth headphone instead. You won’t be able to go as far from the computer but it will be lighter.

For those who prefer TV, there’s an Argentinean TV news station that broadcasts free over the Internet. It is quite good. Alternatively, there are a few free Uruguayan web TV channels, but they are not always available and the programming is not always interesting.

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