Breaking Español

We’re introducing a new segment where we catch up with each other about the past week in Spanish. Thank you, everyone, for the great feedback about our previous conversations in Spanish for motivating us to do this. We think this will be a good way to share where we are at in our journey as well as help you learn a bit in the process. Enjoy!

Thanks to Lalo we recently discovered a fun new app called Hello Talk which has been a ton of fun so far. It’s sort of like having a pen pal from another country that is trying to learn your language, and you theirs. So you can chat back and forth as well as correct each others messages. It’s a whole new experience for us that we were excited to share.

We’re excited to have our Spanish teacher Lalo Vega back on the program. We start out this episode by speaking in Spanish for several minutes to give you guys an idea of where we’re at as well as what a typical class is like for us. After our Spanish convo we had some fun learning Jerga or Slang from Lalo. We even learned some lessons on how to slow down and speak more clearly in Spanish so we are able to improve our level.

This week we have an interview with Rachel Leake. Rachel is a jet setter with a passion for learning Spanish and immersing herself into Latin culture. She recently went on a solo trip to South America and had lots of stories to share with us. Enjoy!

Part 3 of our journal through Oaxaca is all about Mezcal. We heard about this unforgettable mezcal educational tour of some palenques (Mezcal Distilleries) from some friends we made at the bed and breakfast. They gave us the guys info who we quickly called the following day and scheduled our tour for Sunday, the day before we were leaving.

In part 2 of our Journal through Oaxaca we take you on a tour through their unique botanical garden, to the ancient ruins of Monte Albán, and through the Museo de Textil. Monte Albán is a special place that reminds you how old the region of Oaxaca is. We toured this ancient center of the Zapotec people almost entirely in Spanish on a hot day with our toddler. The botanical gardens offered a peak into the Oaxacan culture and native landscape while the Museo de Textile showed just how colorful and expressive their people are.

This is Part 1 of our journal through Oaxaca. We are excited to share all about this beautiful and vibrant city in southern Mexico. We start with where you should stay, what to do, and how the food and art can’t be missed, enjoy! And look forward to Part 2 and 3 in the coming weeks.

This week we have a very special guest, Aileen Passariello McAleer, a co-founder of our favorite app, Mama Lingua!

Lately we’ve been really focusing on helping Jack learn to speak. Like all parents we’ve read way too many articles on the internet about this which basically just confuse the issue. In this week’s episode we talk in depth about this and share our new words.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! We’re excited to join you in the new year and all that it will bring. This week we reflect on the year that past and our goals for 2017. We also found this hilarious article about speaking Spanglish in the San Diego reader which had us laughing mucho! ¡Gracias por Escuchar!

A friend of ours, Cedric Dahl, recently returned from a ten month trip to Spain and some nearby countries so the day he got back we bought him some BBQ and locked him in the studio to hear his story.

It’s our favorite time of year again, tamale season! There also apparently are other holidays going on as well. This week we talk about the traditions we’re adopting from our Latin neighbors and those that we’re keeping from our own childhood.

We love watching Spanish movies. It helps us expand our vocabulary and learn the different accents used throughout the world. This week we share our thoughts on the movie Embarazados as well as our experiences speaking Spanish in real life including meeting a bilingual family from Israel. ¡Gracias por Escuchar!

For Thanksgiving this year we spent it with our neighbors who are partly from Mexico. We enjoyed the time together learning about the traditional dishes they brought and talking about our upcoming trip to Oaxaca.

This week I (ben) do a solo episode talking about learning a language with your spouse. It’s not all sunshine and roses so here I’ll go into some of the ups and down that we’ve went through and how we’re making it work. Enjoy!

This week we go into some uplifting phrases we found as well as an app we love for learning commands to tell your kids. As we go through we decided to make a game out of it where Ben quizzes Jennie on what the phrases mean. ¡Disfrutas!

This week we look into what impact president-elect Trump could have on the Latino community in the United States. A lot of us are still shaking our head as to how this happened and what this will mean, but we did some research and break down what specific actions an anti-immigrant president means to millions of Americans.

Okay, so we tried to go camping and well, it didn’t go perfect. However, regardless of our failed overnight camping attempt due to rain and near freezing temperatures, we still used this as a learning opportunity. After retiring from the wilderness for the season, we ended up watching a great Spanish movie that we loved. Enjoy!

This week we’re talking all about immersion. There are two main ways we think about immersion, in school and in life. So we have two stories this week about how bilingual education may be coming back if a state proposition passes as well as a tale of one woman who took her family through Mexico and South America to truly immerse themselves in Latin life and culture.

This week we catch up with our learning journey. We had a class with Lalo so we have lots of words and phrases to share. As well, we are planning a trip to Oaxaca and in doing so had to navigate making the travel arrangements in Spanish over email. This posed a challenge but we got through it and share our tips on how you can navigate these situations also.