Free Mini Spanish Listening Clips for Class or Self-Study

[Jcooney]

Hi everyone! I’m Jerry Cooney, a high school Spanish teacher, and I’ve recently started a YouTube channel called Hoosier Chayo as a personal project I work on in my free time. It features very short (10–15 second) videos designed to help learners get comfortable understanding natural spoken Spanish. The speaker is a fictional AI character named Chayo Estrada, and new videos are posted every Tuesday.

I’d love for teachers and learners to check it out and let me know if you find it useful—and I’d really appreciate any feedback or suggestions you have.

Channel link can be found in my profile page.

-JC

[Rusty]

Welcome to the forums!

Your site looks fun and likely quite useful for those wanting to learn.

[Jcooney]

Originally Posted by Rusty

Welcome to the forums!

Your site looks fun and likely quite useful for those wanting to learn.

Thank you! I appreciate that. This was originally just for my own benefit, to give me some more practice because I can give the AI a context, but let it develop the actual dialogue from it, which let me practice listening to the language only knowing in advance the context of what the character was going to say.

I've been having so much fun with it, that I wanted to both share what I've done in case others found it useful and preserve my work, so YouTube seemed like the best way to go.

And thanks for helping me with the link. I think it should be visible in my profile now.

[aleCcowaN]

Welcome, Jerry!

This project sounds great. Have you thought about maybe developing a companion website to provide explanations, goals and languages level needed for each video, maybe using WordPress?

A suggestion for the future: Have Chayo meeting a friend, a Latin America born one, so they can dialogue and show one or two differences. One percent of Spain's population was born in Ecuador.

[Jcooney]

Originally Posted by aleCcowaN

Welcome, Jerry!

This project sounds great. Have you thought about maybe developing a companion website to provide explanations, goals and languages level needed for each video, maybe using WordPress?

A suggestion for the future: Have Chayo meeting a friend, a Latin America born one, so they can dialogue and show one or two differences. One percent of Spain's population was born in Ecuador.

Thanks for your interest! I've been tossing around some ideas for companion sites, but I haven't committed to anything yet. Right now I'm just trying to keep up with the technology side of making the videos and getting the word out.

I've also been making videos specifically designed for my students. In those, the characters speak much slower and I make sure the dialogue uses the current vocabulary and grammar we are studying, so they are less free-wheeling and natural-sounding than the Chayo videos. I've been tossing around the idea of bringing those over onto the Chayo Estrada page as well, but I'm not sure yet.

We are going to meet some of Chayo's family and friends soon and there are native Spanish speakers, non-native Spanish speakers and non-Spanish speakers in that group. The first of those videos are almost ready to go and will probably be released in upcoming weeks.

They take a lot more work though because the software (Sora.com is the site I use) struggles when multiple people are conversing in one video. It can do it, but it usually takes several more iterations to get a good video when multiple characters share a scene.