7. BBC’s Mi Vida Loca – This is a fantastic little show put together by the BBC specifically intended for the sole purpose of teaching Spanish to complete beginners. It’s filled with drama and action, it’s very interesting and entertaining, you learn a lot about Spanish culture, and it is absolutely not boring. It’s not just Spanish videos with subtitles in Spanish, they’ve also got numerous tools and activities to help you learn Spanish in addition to offering Spanish and English subtitles for the whole thing (you can have both turned on at the same time! note the screenshots I took below), such as an interactive (human) phrasebook that pops in here and there to teach you important vocabulary and grammar rules that you’re about to see used, as well as quizzes and exercises you can do. This is really a wonderful resource, especially if you’re a beginner, I can’t recommend it enough.

English and Spanish subtitles:

Interactive phrasebook:

8. Extr@ (this is a YouTube channel that has all 13 episodes with subtitles in Spanish) – This is a TV show in Spanish specifically designed for Spanish learners, the actors speak slowly and clearly and use vocabulary that’s not too advanced. I’d say it’s intended for beginner and intermediate adult learners, probably high school and college level, so it’s perfect for most of you. A summary of the plot, from Wikipedia:

“Sam, with only a very basic grasp of the featured language, comes to stay with his penpal, Lola. Sam’s efforts to get to grips with the language provide the central dynamic for the series’ language learning content. The series is particularly suitable for adolescents and young adults who can relate to the contextual setting and implied meanings in the screenplay.”

I originally found out about this thanks to a reader, Robin, posting a link in the comments below to another YouTube channel that has all the episodes (albeit without subtitles) and then my friend and fellow language blogger, Jennie of ielanguages.com (who has recently started learning Spanish), decided to be awesome and popped in with the transcripts and another YouTube channel that had the videos with subtitles, which is the one I first linked to above. Here are the transcripts and more (look to the menu on the left for them as well links to the same for other episodes in that series):

Series 1

Series 2

Series 3

Music Videos

I can’t possibly list every single Spanish music video that includes the lyrics, but I will give you some examples and then show you how you can obtain the lyrics for nearly any other one that you want even if the video doesn’t include them.

Of course I have to throw in some Shakira videos…

Here’s La Tortura with lyrics

And Inevitable

Ciega, Sordomuda

Antes de las Seis

Suerte

Te Aviso, Te Anuncio

Ojos Así

And for the Juanes fans there are a ton, including…

A Dios Le Pido

Y Es por Ti

Fotografía

…and many more, just search YouTube for “Juanes letras” (“letras” is Spanish for “lyrics”, and you want to search in Spanish because of course you want the Spanish lyrics not an English translation which is what will frequently come up if you say “lyrics” instead of “letras”).

Where to find lyrics for nearly any song

There are several popular sites for looking up lyrics that have them for nearly every song that’s ever been even somewhat popular (English, Spanish, French, etc., doesn’t matter). Check out…

https://www.lyrics.com/

https://www.azlyrics.com/

http://www.songlyrics.com/

https://genius.com/

http://www.metrolyrics.com/

http://www.lyricsfreak.com/

Spanish Children’s Stories and Spanish Cartoons

1. BookBox – Fantastic little site, though they’ve only got 13 videos right now. What they do is make an animated video based on a children’s story into a video and then read that story out loud during the video. All videos have complete subtitles and are available in numerous languages. Just look directly underneath the bottom right side of the video on the front page and you’ll see a menu where you can select whatever language you want. When you select Spanish the horizontal menu below should change and say “View 13 Stories in Spanish”, then just select whichever story you’d like to listen to. You can also get directly to these by going to their YouTube channel, and if you’d like the Spanish ones you can just go to their playlist of them here.

Spanish News with Spanish Subtitles (or transcripts)

1. EuroNews – Fantastic site, they provide videos in one of several available languages and then there are transcripts directly below each video. My link goes to the Spanish version of the site, the main homepage is here where you can select from various languages using the menu at the very top left of the page, the default is English.

2. United Nations Multimedia Page for Spanish – Here you can find videos and radio broadcasts in Spanish, all of which have transcripts with them, plus the videos have subtitles in Spanish, just click the little “CC” button at the bottom of the video. Their YouTube channel is here, they have about four pages worth of videos. Not bad, not the most riveting stuff in the world, but it works and you’ll learn about some things going on in the world.

Educational Videos in Spanish (lectures and documentaries)

1. Spanish TED Videos (118 pages of them at the time of this writing) – First contribution by a reader, and only a day after I first posted this–excellent. Thank you, Dally. TED, as many of you know, records and publishes free educational lectures and talks online. The talks are in many different languages, their search function allows you to search by language, and most of their videos have subtitles, however…I did a little investigating before posting this and found that some videos had English subtitles, some videos had good Spanish subtitles (such as this one), some videos had crappy Spanish subtitles, and some videos had no subtitles at all. So, you’ve been warned, you’re going to have to do some sifting.

Random Spanish Video Collections

Here is where there’s more sheer quantity than anything else. Three of the sites I’ve found so far do something very similar: they just take random videos from wherever (usually YouTube) and then the users do subtitles for them for free. Fantastic sites, they’re adding new videos all the time, and, of course, the biggest benefit is that they’re completely free. The other two sites are run by educational institutes. You will, with all of them however, have to sift through them and pick out what you want to watch (I, for one, am really not that picky since the primary purpose is for me to learn Spanish, so as long as it’s at least mildly interesting, I’m happy).

1. Amara aka UniversalSubtitles.org – Wow. I just found this one the other day, they currently list 4,626 videos in Spanish with Spanish subtitles (note that you can search and sort by language of the speakers and subtitle language using the search bar on the videos homepage, just pull the menu down and select your languages). Again, these are just videos that people have found on YouTube and decided to do the subtitles for. Note that you can sign up for an account and help subtitle videos of any language you speak.

2. Edustation.me’s Video Section – You’ll need to sign up for a free account to use this one, I believe. Once you’ve done that, look at the menu at the top right and select the language that you’re learning where it says “Idioma para aprender”, then go to the homepage and click “Peliculas” on the bottom left hand side of the screen (between “Artículos” and “Fotos”). They have a ton of videos there with subtitles, but again these are just YouTube videos that Spanish-speaking users have selected and elected to write up some subtitles for, the community does all the work (again, just like with Amara you, too, can sign up and help out by doing some subtitles in whatever languages you speak).

3. Rhinospike Spanish Transcriptions – Again, these are just a bunch of random videos and audio files that the users have decided to do transcripts for. There appear to be about 70 transcriptions total.

4. Catálogo de voces hispánicas by the Cervantes Institute – This is really cool in my opinion, this is a collection of videos of native speakers from all over the Spanish-speaking world speaking their dialect of Spanish, so you can hear and compare how people speak in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Guadalajara, Mexico; Bogotá, Colombia; and Barcelona, Spain; etc. Each video sample includes a transcript, a list of linguistic characteristics of this particular type of Spanish, and some information about the location.

5. Spanish Proficiency Exercises from the University of Texas at Austin – As best I can tell this is part of their Spanish program. They have a lot of these videos, all of which have transcripts. From the website: “A complete index of video interviews and podcasts, as well as related grammar, vocabulary, and phrases contained in this site is listed below. A topical grammar index and podcast help are also available.” Each video not only has a transcript, but it also has an accompanying explanation of all the grammar and vocabulary used as well as an associated podcast of it. This is essentially an entire Spanish course based on videos of native speakers speaking…which is actually pretty good, to be honest, and it’s free–you can’t argue with free.

6. YouTube Subtitler – Subtitles in Spanish – This is one sent to me by a language exchange partner in Colombia–thanks, Diana! It’s the same thing as the first few, a community of people who subtitle YouTube videos for free in their spare time, basically just helping each other out by subtitling videos in their native language so that people who speak other languages will do the same for videos in their native language. They have 20 videos per page and 500 pages of Spanish videos as of right now, so that means that they currently have right around 10,000 Spanish-language videos with Spanish subtitles. This is probably one of the largest, if not the largest, of these sorts of sites that I’ve found yet.

Related Resources

An excellent course that would probably interest you if you’re just getting started in Spanish and want to focus on learning how to speak it with perfect pronunciation, that relies on immitating native speakers in the sort of media that’s on this list, is called The Mimic Method, specifically their “39 Elemental Sounds of Spanish”. Check it out, try it, let me know if you like it.

Lastly, it just so happens that I wrote a book about precisely how to learn Spanish from the kind of popular media above! It’s called The Telenovela Method and is available on Amazon, Apple iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Scribd, and Goodreads (also, your local bookstore should be able to order a copy if you like). The e-book version is about $7.99 and the paperback is about $14.99 (varies a bit by retailer). It’s about how to use popular media of your choice (movies, TV shows, music, books, news, etc.) to learn Spanish on your own. It’s centered almost entirely around online resources, the overwhelming majority of which are free (those that aren’t are very inexpensive and not necessary). I called it The Telenovela Method because the popular media I initially used to learn most of my Spanish about nine years ago was telenovelas (that’s what soap operas are called in Spanish) because they were just about the only thing I could find that, occasionally at least, included subtitles in Spanish. You don’t need to use telenovelas, no, pick what appeals to you.

Conclusion

Ok, that’s all I’ve got for now. Please, if you know of any others, leave them in the comments and I’ll add them and give you credit, or if you notice that a link no longer works, please say so in the comments and I’ll fix it straight away. Any comments left are e-mailed to me and I’ll see them very shortly, believe me I read all of them and respond to most of them, also… If you thought the above was at all useful and you want to learn (or are learning) Spanish, please give me a chance and read what I have to say about my book below! Thank you so much for checking out my blog and I hope you’ve enjoyed my writing.

Cheers,

Andrew