Watching programs in Spanish can be tricky and sometimes frustrating. Just as there are many different English dialects, there are many different Spanish dialects too.  I personally have a hard time understanding someone from England or Ireland and they are speaking English!

For the beginning student, watching TV in Spanish may be detrimental. It doesn’t take much to get thrown off and become frustrated. This is something you want to avoid. I recommend waiting until you have a few lessons under your belt. If and when you start watching TV in Spanish, I would follow this recommendation: turn on the Closed Caption option on your television. Make sure the language is set to Spanish (not English). This way, you can read what is being said (in Spanish) at the same time as hearing it. It will help you become accustomed to the different Spanish dialects out there and not get thrown off. It’s amazing how many words you miss until you actually see what is being said.

There is a great video program series called Destinos. It is an educational television program created Bill VanPatten Professor of Spanish at the University of Illinois.  Destinos uses the telenovela (Spanish soap opera) format to teach Spanish-language speaking, listening, and comprehension skills. Early episodes have English-language narration in addition to the Spanish-language dialogue, but the English language content decreases continually, eventually disappearing entirely.

I highly recommend Destinos for anyone learning Spanish or interested in watching a program in Spanish.
Occassionally PBS will run various episodes of Destinos or you can visithttp://www.learner.org/resources/series75.html
 and view each of the episodes free of charge! If you prefer to have your own set of VHS or DVDs you can check on Ebay. There is also a text and workbook that are components of the program.

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