Spanish Immersion 101: Watching and Reading the News in Spanish

Posted by Garner McCloud on March 10, 2017

I read and watch the news every morning. It’s a daily ritual that I don’t even think about. I just do it.

I am also learning Spanish. I used to have to plan to learn Spanish, and make dedicated time for it in my day. But then I started thinking about how I could hack my life so that I could make Spanish work for me.

Since reading the news is already a daily ritual for me and quite easy to do, I figured that I should build on that and learn Spanish at the same time. By doing that, it makes Spanish learning a daily ritual, which is one of the best ways to keep Spanish fresh in your mind.

Where Can I Find News in Spanish?

The first problem that I had to solve was finding news sources in Spanish. I googled around a bit and found what I thought were good resources. However one issue that kept coming up was that all of the resources were dedicated to Spanish speak countries, such as Spain or Mexico. Obviously this makes sense, these are the biggest Spanish speaking markets.

But I’m from New York and while I do like to stay up to date on international news, what is most relevant to me is local and national news for the U.S. I get my news from the New York Times, CNN, American broadcast networks and the like.

I had the same issue with sports news, almost all Spanish sports news is dedicated to soccer. Well I recently started to like soccer, but I grew up loving the NFL and NBA. So I almost always get my latest stories from American outlets like ESPN, NBA.com, and NFL.com.

Thus my initial search results brought me to a dilemma. The whole point of this was to build on my morning news ritual, and it wouldn’t work if I broke away from my news interests.

I had to find mediums that wrote in Spanish on U.S. national news and sports news topics.

Unfortunately, there weren't any good articles on this topic so I had to get to work like I always do. If you are in the same boat as me, here is what I found:

U.S. and World News - TV

Each of these are available locally in most states for free with an antenna or your local provider. To see the correct channel for your location, you can enter your zip code here to check:
https://nocable.org/

U.S. and World News - Reading

Sports News - TV

I don't have cable so I couldn't find any live TV stations in Spanish that focus on the American big four sports. I suggest going to the websites in the reading section below which should also have video content.

Sports News - Reading

  • ESPN Deportes
    • Like the English site, this is the most well-rounded source of American sports news that I can find in Spanish.
  • Univision Deportes
    • While 50% of the news is soccer content, it also has a good amount of dedicated coverage to the MLB, NFL and NBA.

With those resources, I have replaced all of the English news that I typically consume each day with their Spanish equivalent. Now while I have the replacements, I don’t know the channels/links by muscle memory like I did with the old English mediums. I needed to make this as seamless of a transition as possible.

Make it Easy for Yourself

For the internet sites, I created a bookmark folder so that I can quickly click on what I want to read next and I'm taken directly to the Spanish news site. The same thing was done for the sports news as well. Since I already did this for myself, I'm happy to share with you my bookmark folder in chrome. Here it is:
Spanish Bookmarks

In order to add it, follow the steps here for chrome:
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/96816?hl=en

For the TV stations, it should be easier. Just put the channels on a post-it note near the TV or remote so that you can reference it.

So now you know how to leverage your morning news ritual to learn Spanish every day. Immersion is one of the best techniques for learning Spanish, so I wholeheartedly recommend this and other actions that get you immersed in Spanish.

If you are curious of what else you can do, check out my guide on getting yourself completely immersed in Spanish without leaving your home.


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