Spanish Listening Practice: Learn to Speak and Improve Your Spanish Listening Comprehension

Listening is an essential part of learning Spanish. Improving your Spanish listening skills will allow you to understand Spanish music, movies, and TV shows.

And, if you want to travel to Spain or any other Spanish-speaking country, it will allow you to communicate with native speakers more effectively.

This is why it is important that you engage in listening activities, such as listening exercises.

You can test your listening comprehension anytime with the following video!

Fortunately, there are many listening resources on the internet.

Check them out!

1. Best Spanish Listening Apps to Improve Your Spanish Listening Skills

Lawless Spanish: Combine Listening and Writing with Dictation Exercises

Lawless Spanish contains Spanish lessons and other tools created by polyglot Laura K. Lawless. The website also has Spanish listening exercises based on audio and video.

Some of them are dictation exercises (which combine listening and writing), while others include Spanish transcripts and click-to-display English translations.

You can sort them out by type of exercise and by Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR) proficiency levels.

And the best thing about it?

You can browse it for free! Or, if you’d like a tutor, you can get a tutor from the site’s collaborator, LanguaTalk.

Spanish Listening: Listen to Native Speakers Talking About Various Topics

Spanish Listening is a website for which people from Spain and Latin America upload videos talking about different things.

They get asked simple questions, such as what are their hobbies or their favorite cities, and they answer with short videos that Spanish learners of all levels can utilize as listening practice in different accents.

The videos are divided into beginner, intermediate, and advanced according to the difficulty of the words the speakers use on them, and they have transcripts to help you understand what is being said.

Whether you are a beginner, an intermediate or an advanced student, you can check out these lessons completely free!

FluentU: Audio Dialogues One Click Away

FluentU is an app that focuses on language immersion. It has a lot of videos in Spanish: music videos, news videos, commercials, movie trailers, etc. They all have interactive captions to help you understand them.

FluentU also offers downloadable audio dialogues so that you can go ahead with your listening practice even when you don’t have an Internet connection.

You can get started with 14 days for free – and if you like the platform, you can sign up for a monthly or a yearly subscription!

TIP: If you use THIS link for FluentU, you’ll get a discount from their offer!

Speechling: Speak! and Get Feedback from Online Coaches

Speechling is a freemium language platform that focuses on speech. After you sign up on the platform, you can listen to phrases and repeat them, or answer questions on a microphone.

Your recordings will be sent to a human coach, who will provide feedback on your listening skills and your pronunciation so that you’ll know what are your strengths and weaknesses with oral Spanish.

As mentioned before, Speechling is freemium: you can use it for free forever (but you will have to wait longer for feedback) or sign up for the Speechling Unlimited for a smaller price. With Speechling Unlimited you will receive personal 1-on-1 coaching, audio journal history and full access to offline learning libraries.

TIP: You can use THIS link for Speechling to get a special discount from their offering.

LingQ: A Vast Content Library to Improve Your Spanish Listening Skills

LingQ is a language learning platform created by polyglot Steve Kauffman, who believes in the power of immersion for language learning.

LingQ offers a vast library of Spanish content to improve your listening skills: videos, songs, podcasts, etc., of multiple topics to boost your comprehension.  

Lingq has a free version but for the full library, you can choose between various Premium and Premium Plus subscriptions: make sure to choose the best for yourself!

2. Best Spanish Listening Practice Resources for All Levels (A1, A2, B1, B2)

Spanish Proficiency Exercises by the University of Texas

The University of Texas at Austin has put together a collection of videos that feature native Spanish speakers from different countries.

These videos are designed to help you practice and improve your listening skills, while also exposing you to different accents.

Some of the videos are intended for beginners and feature speakers who speak slowly and clearly, with scripts available to help you follow along. Don’t worry if you don’t understand it at first, it’s part of the learning process!

Videos for intermediate Spanish and advanced Spanish learners feature speakers who speak more naturally, without the aid of scripts.

And the best? It’s free!

Spring Spanish: Complex Language Courses with the Best Teachers Online

Spring Languages (of which I’m a co-founder) offers a variety of language courses for individuals looking to improve their language skills.

Among their offerings is Spring Spanish, a program designed to help learners improve their proficiency in the Spanish language. The program offers an amazing radionovela which is basically an audio-based soap opera. It’s extremely popular in Latin America.

Beside the story (that is full of excitement and adventures) it is a true goldmine of chunks because it’s based on casual conversations!

Whether you are a beginner or looking to improve your existing skills, Spring Spanish can help you achieve your language goals.

You can watch any YouTube video in Spanish or you can test your listening skills with videos like these:

Spanish Podcasts: Listen to Spoken Spanish

What all of these resources do is provide exposure to the language. You can do this on your own, for example, by finding your own podcasts to listen to, and simply try to understand them.

These podcasts don’t necessarily have to be about learning Spanish, but about any topic that you are interested in.

However, you may benefit from listening to Spanish podcast episodes that are intended to help you improve your listening skills specifically.  

For example, Notes in Spanish is a Spanish learning podcast that exposes you to natural conversations about several topics, such as news, Spanish culture, and travel.  

SpanishPod101 – with 1800 episodes – is one of the most extensive Spanish podcasts out there. I recently wrote an in-depth SpanishPod101 review article based from my point-of-view.

Another option is “Un día en español” (A Day in Spanish), a podcast that features everyday stories told by native speakers.

News in Slow Spanish is great for those people who like to be up-to-date with the most important news from around the world. With this podcast, you can get all the updates in Spanish!

Audiobooks: Learn Vocabulary and Grammar

Audible is one of the most popular platforms for downloading audiobooks. If you go to the Spanish section, you can get many audiobooks to practice your Spanish listening.

We highly recommend that you choose a book that you already know in your native language so that it will be easier to understand, or go for titles such as El Principito (The Little Prince), which has a relatively simple vocabulary.

Another easy audiobook is La Edad de Oro, which is a magical story in a magical land.

For intermediate and advanced learners, we recommend Sherlock Holmes and Moby Dick: they both have a classic yet always interesting story arc and some more advanced vocabulary.

Spanish Movies and TV Shows: The Best Way to Practice Your Listening Skills and Comprehension Skills 

You can also improve your Spanish listening skills with Spanish movies and TV shows.

They will allow you to listen to native speakers in the context of a scene, which will make it easier for you to understand what you hear.

Select a movie or TV show that interests you. Make sure it’s from the Spanish-speaking country whose accent you’d like to immerse yourself in.

Here’s a list of the best Spanish shows that you can use to train your ear in that language.

The best ones to try out are probably Narcos and La casa de papel.

If you have checked out all of these resources, maybe you can even engage in a conversation practice!

3. Use Conversation Based Chunking to Reach Level C1 

Our method of conversation-based chunking recognizes the importance of real-life conversation in language learning.

It can help you improve your Spanish listening skills by exposing you to natural language and allowing you to grasp meaningful phrases instead of separate words.  

Here’s all you need to know about Conversation Based Chunking.