Foreign Language Training: New Way of Learning Spanish

A new television web channel has just emerged. It is Lingus.tv (www.lingus.tv), a channel dedicated to teaching Spanish as a foreign language. Lingus.tv is fundamentally distinguished for basing its teaching method on a sitcom, its own production, making the core issues of its teaching model funny, entertaining and amusing.

"Our aim is to promote interest in studying Spanish in a pleasant, attractive way, based on the concept of leisure," affirms Sergio Gazeau, founder of Lingus.tv. "The Internet has become the principal leisure tool of society, especially among young people, and our challenge is to have fun whilst learning", he adds.

Following the trend marked by Internet, the Lingus.tv teaching system is based on a philosophy of self-service, where the users have a video library of contents available classified in levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced) labeled depending on the themes they cover and the linguistic skills they teach. Among these themes we can find chapters like "Mi rutina" or "Pacocinando", where one of its characters, Paco, shows the user how to cook a typical Spanish dish: the Spanish potato omelette, all marked in a frame of humour.

Each episode of the series will come with its Spanish sub-titles and will last approximately two minutes. Video is the core to the education process and includes its respective teaching material: complete transcript of the script, English translation and a selection of notes that introduce grammatical and cultural concepts.

In the words of its founder, "The project, that is filmed in different parts of Spain, aims at being something more than just teaching Spanish, become a true window display of the culture and life style in Spain." With this twofold objective, the chapters that appear on the web "will gradually not only introduce grammatical or semantic concepts, but also sayings, proverbs and cultural elements specific to our country. We want foreigners to learn man-in-the-street Spanish and make them gradually assimilate our culture and form of communicating with one another," he concludes.

Lingus.tv broadcasts new episodes of its sitcom every Tuesday and Thursday and in the next few months, it will extend its offer of contents to include new programmes on its programming grid.