4 Secrets To Learning A Language With Audiobooks
Audiobooks, books on tape and books with CDs are an amazing resource when it comes to language learning. Listening to Spanish audiobooks allows you to listen to native speakers, learn on the go, and learn to pronounce and read in Spanish at the same time!
Since audiobooks in Spanish give you so much bang for your buck, I recommend adding at least a few to your Spanish resource collection.
I’m learning Spanish alongside my daughter, so our options are mostly….Disney!
Disney has some really great resources in Spanish – some that are original and others that are translated from the English versions.
As my daughter really enjoys Disney characters, so anything Disney related is highly engaging for her. Since she’s so into it, it’s been important for me to find some of their resources to support our Spanish learning.
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Why Choose Spanish AudioBooks?
Of course, when you think of Disney you usually think of the movies and TV shows, and those can be great Spanish resources for your family, too! While we have seen some of the Disney movies in Spanish, I really try and limit my daughter’s screen time, so I’ve looked for other ways to incorporate Disney in Spanish into our lives.
One Disney resource that I’ve found very helpful as a Spanish learner is their books with CDs (books on tape).
There are so many options and stories available that it’s easy to find something that will fit with your family’s tastes.
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Not a Disney fan? Check out these posts on other great books on tape and audiobooks!
How An Audiobook Can Help Your Child Speak Spanish
How To Improve Your Language Skills With This Interesting Experiment
How To Use These Epic Online Spanish Books For Beginners
Books with CD and audio books are an amazing resource because they can benefit so many parts of your language development and they can be used in a variety of ways.
4 Secrets To Using Audiobooks For Language Learning
Listen And Read Along
1. You can listen to the CD and follow along with the book at the same time. This will help you and your child to hear the pronunciation of the words that you’re seeing on the page.
When you hear a word spoken and read it simultaneously, you’re much more likely to store it in your long term memory as you’ve connected to it on an auditory and visual level. When you’re listening to music in Spanish, it can be hard to hear the pronunciation of the words over the rhythm and the background noise, but with a book on tape you can clearly hear the narrator and the pronunciation of the word- something that’s extra important for non-native speakers and beginning Spanish language learners.
Listening to the story while following along with the words can also aid your comprehension of the book. When a narrator reads a book on tape, they’re often speaking at a slower pace than they would if they were having a conversation with someone as well.
Listen On The Go
2. Your family can listen to the CD in the car without the book and just enjoy it as an audiobook. This can help to tune your ears for Spanish language and allow you to listen on the go. Keeping the CD for the book on tape with you allows you to use travel time to increase your Spanish learning time since you can listen in the car.
It also provides the opportunity for you to enjoy the story multiple times. My daughter and I keep several CDs in the car at once so that we can listen to stories in the car several times a week. Repeatedly listening to the same story on tape will only help to increase your fluency and listening comprehension in Spanish.
Use To Build Interest
3. Disney audiobooks often include music and character voices from the movies, making them more engaging for younger listeners who will enjoy that connection. The more engagement and interest that you build for Spanish learning, the more likely it is that your family will continue to use it!
My daughter has seen a few of the Disney movies and when she can sing along to the characters and talk along with her favorite lines from the movies, it makes her that much more excited to listen to the story and engage with it.
Also, the Disney books on CD that we enjoy have books with beautiful images that are from the movies. The full page images also make the storybooks themselves highly engaging for my daughter, who likes to examine the illustrations carefully and talk about what happened at that part in the movie.
Practice Pronunciation
4. After listening to the story on CD, you can read it aloud to your child. Having heard the pronunciation will make you a more fluent reader, especially if you listen and read along with the CD multiple times.
One of my daughter’s favorite Disney audiobooks is “El Rey Leon” (The Lion King). The first time I went to read the book, there were several words that I didn’t know how to pronounce and didn’t recognize. After listening to the CD in the car a few times, I was able to easily pick up on the pronunciation and the phrasing of the book and read it with inflection to my daughter.
As a non-native Spanish speaker, reading out loud in Spanish is one of the best ways that I can make sure that my daughter hears me speaking grammatically correct Spanish. You and your child will both benefit from increased language interaction, too. (for more benefits on reading aloud to your child click here).
There are a lot of great books on tape in Spanish and audiobooks that you can buy or access online. For various lists of audiobooks and books on tape, I recommend checking out this post on SpanishMama where she breaks down a few different types of audiobooks and where to get them.
While we have accessed several different types of audiobooks, this series of books on tape is definitely our favorite since it can be enjoyed in so many different ways.
Here are the Disney libros y CD that we’ve collected over the years. They can be a little expensive to get and are sometimes out of stock. I usually search around on Amazon and then save them to my list and wait for the price to go down a bit.
This book isn’t part of the above series but it’s also a great Disney audiobook that we listen to a lot!
If you’re in the car or even in your living room at home and looking for some more Spanish immersion, these books with CD are a great way to listen and practice with the whole family!
Do you use audiobooks or books on tape? Leave me a comment or send me a message with your favorites!
Happy Learning!
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