Breaking Español

Hola Todos! Alright, we have another quick episode for you to absorb today. It's about finding your WHY. We really feel this has helped us stick to learning past the first few weeks, months, and even year after taking on the challenge of studying a new language.  Your WHY is what will keep you going. We give some tips and ideas on how to find yours in today's episode.

Hola Chicos! We have a mini-episode for you today that will hopefully inspire you to try something new! These are our 5 favorite things to do when we need some inspiration to practice and use our Spanish. Try 1 or all of them and let us know how it went!

We are officially back in Spanish classes! But this time, we're going separately. Not only that but this time we're doing group sessions with up to 4 other people which have been a new and fun experience. In this episode, we share all about how the classes are going as well as some other recent adventures including a TON of new vocab.

Feliz Año Nuevo! We start the show and the new year off with what we are looking forward to doing this year.  It was just 3 years ago that "learn Spanish" was one of our New Years resolutions and we made it happen! If you are just starting your journey into learning Spanish or have decided to make the commitment this year, then this episode is for you. We share the steps we took to get started and what has really worked for us. The most important, how we progressed so fast. We share our language learning goals we set for this year. Starting with we enrolled back in Spanish classes!

Nuestra ultimo episodio del año! Another year that we have completed podcasting our journey to become a bilingual family. It had it's excitement and challenges and we recap it in this last episode of 2017. Enjoy! Jennie y Benjamin

We are back this week after visiting family and have some thoughts and feelings on how our family reacted to our son speaking "solo en español"!  Our road trip brought on some opportunities to come up with games to play in Spanish and songs to sing.

We catch you up on our week full of excitement (we won a Tesla car!) and challenges keeping up our practice when life gets busy. We have a funny story where an important message about our son Jack got lost in translation. Jennie shares what she has come across while disciplining Jack in Spanish and how expressing in a new language is challenging.

Today we bring you a new series! To kick it off I sit down with my good friend Tera Lopez Vannoy. We chat what it's like to dive headfirst into the unknown that is raising your first born bilingual.

This is our 50th episode!!! On today's show, we share some key things we did to "dress the part" around our home. This episode is full of our recommendations and tips to incorporating bilingual learning throughout your house. A full list of show notes with our recommendations from today can be found at breakingespanol.com/50 Gracias por escuchar! Ciao!

We catch up on the week, Ben was in New York and had a couple opportunities to make conversation with Spanish speakers from Columbia. He's never shy to spark up a convo with anyone. Our son Jack has been speaking all his colors in Spanish.  We love how he pronounces rosa “Sosa"

We're back! After our summer break we've started recording again and are starting with five things we learned during our break as we continued our journey.

It's been almost a year since we started this podcast. Amazing how time flies! We've loved sharing our story with you along the whole way. As we looking to grow and expand the show we're going to take a break for the summer as we look into other options (Instagram, YouTube, etc.)

After learning Spanish for a while, you develop an extra sensitivity whenever someone starts speaking it near you. This is certainly the case for us and for many others we know.

Jennie's cousin Michael Field is back from his trip through South America! In this episode, we hear about his travels through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, and Uraguay all while staying in hostels. It's a trip we've all wanted to take, now you can hear exactly what it is like. Enjoy!

As we mentioned last week we're losing our nanny, but good news! We've found a bilingual daycare near Jennie's work. We're both excited and nervous at the same time about this. In this episode we talk through how we decided on this and how Jack is doing with his own Spanish.

As we mentioned last week we're losing our nanny, but good news! We've found a bilingual daycare near Jennie's work. We're both excited and nervous at the same time about this. In this episode we talk through how we decided on this and how Jack is doing with his own Spanish.

This episode is all about food. Specifically food from Santiago, Chile. Jennie's recent trip to Chile gave her many opportunities to eat the local fare and enjoy the culture. In this episode she shares all about her cooking class, the markets, and challenges of a foreign language menu.

We continue to start off the show speaking in Spanish. Jennie's back from Chile and ready to share about her time in Santiago and the coastline of Chile. She loved speaking in Spanish while there and has some fun experiences to share. We couldn't fit it all in one episode so catch part 2 next week!

Jennie sent us some clips from her trip to Chile so in this episode you get to hear what it's really like speaking Spanish in another country. Also, Ben has a question for you. ¡Gracias por Escuchar!

Jennie is going to Chile! She's super excited to visit a new country and take in the culture and language with her good friend. In this week we talk about her preparations for the trip and some of the things she is looking to do while in Chile. She'll be back in a week and hopes to record while there so next week stay tuned for some potential clips of her trip.

We're introducing a new segment where we catch up with each other about the past week in Spanish. Thank you, everyone, for the great feedback about our previous conversations in Spanish for motivating us to do this. We think this will be a good way to share where we are at in our journey as well as help you learn a bit in the process. Enjoy!

Thanks to Lalo we recently discovered a fun new app called Hello Talk which has been a ton of fun so far. It's sort of like having a pen pal from another country that is trying to learn your language, and you theirs. So you can chat back and forth as well as correct each others messages. It's a whole new experience for us that we were excited to share.

We're excited to have our Spanish teacher Lalo Vega back on the program. We start out this episode by speaking in Spanish for several minutes to give you guys an idea of where we're at as well as what a typical class is like for us. After our Spanish convo we had some fun learning Jerga or Slang from Lalo. We even learned some lessons on how to slow down and speak more clearly in Spanish so we are able to improve our level.

This week we have an interview with Rachel Leake. Rachel is a jet setter with a passion for learning Spanish and immersing herself into Latin culture. She recently went on a solo trip to South America and had lots of stories to share with us. Enjoy!

Part 3 of our journal through Oaxaca is all about Mezcal. We heard about this unforgettable mezcal educational tour of some palenques (Mezcal Distilleries) from some friends we made at the bed and breakfast. They gave us the guys info who we quickly called the following day and scheduled our tour for Sunday, the day before we were leaving.

In part 2 of our Journal through Oaxaca we take you on a tour through their unique botanical garden, to the ancient ruins of Monte Albán, and through the Museo de Textil. Monte Albán is a special place that reminds you how old the region of Oaxaca is. We toured this ancient center of the Zapotec people almost entirely in Spanish on a hot day with our toddler. The botanical gardens offered a peak into the Oaxacan culture and native landscape while the Museo de Textile showed just how colorful and expressive their people are.

This is Part 1 of our journal through Oaxaca. We are excited to share all about this beautiful and vibrant city in southern Mexico. We start with where you should stay, what to do, and how the food and art can't be missed, enjoy! And look forward to Part 2 and 3 in the coming weeks.

This week we have a very special guest, Aileen Passariello McAleer, a co-founder of our favorite app, Mama Lingua!

Lately we've been really focusing on helping Jack learn to speak. Like all parents we've read way too many articles on the internet about this which basically just confuse the issue. In this week's episode we talk in depth about this and share our new words.

¡Feliz Año Nuevo! We're excited to join you in the new year and all that it will bring. This week we reflect on the year that past and our goals for 2017. We also found this hilarious article about speaking Spanglish in the San Diego reader which had us laughing mucho! ¡Gracias por Escuchar!

A friend of ours, Cedric Dahl, recently returned from a ten month trip to Spain and some nearby countries so the day he got back we bought him some BBQ and locked him in the studio to hear his story.

It's our favorite time of year again, tamale season! There also apparently are other holidays going on as well. This week we talk about the traditions we're adopting from our Latin neighbors and those that we're keeping from our own childhood.

We love watching Spanish movies. It helps us expand our vocabulary and learn the different accents used throughout the world. This week we share our thoughts on the movie Embarazados as well as our experiences speaking Spanish in real life including meeting a bilingual family from Israel. ¡Gracias por Escuchar!

For Thanksgiving this year we spent it with our neighbors who are partly from Mexico. We enjoyed the time together learning about the traditional dishes they brought and talking about our upcoming trip to Oaxaca.

This week I (ben) do a solo episode talking about learning a language with your spouse. It's not all sunshine and roses so here I'll go into some of the ups and down that we've went through and how we're making it work. Enjoy!

This week we go into some uplifting phrases we found as well as an app we love for learning commands to tell your kids. As we go through we decided to make a game out of it where Ben quizzes Jennie on what the phrases mean. ¡Disfrutas!

This week we look into what impact president-elect Trump could have on the Latino community in the United States. A lot of us are still shaking our head as to how this happened and what this will mean, but we did some research and break down what specific actions an anti-immigrant president means to millions of Americans.

Okay, so we tried to go camping and well, it didn't go perfect. However, regardless of our failed overnight camping attempt due to rain and near freezing temperatures, we still used this as a learning opportunity. After retiring from the wilderness for the season, we ended up watching a great Spanish movie that we loved. Enjoy!

This week we're talking all about immersion. There are two main ways we think about immersion, in school and in life. So we have two stories this week about how bilingual education may be coming back if a state proposition passes as well as a tale of one woman who took her family through Mexico and South America to truly immerse themselves in Latin life and culture.

This week we catch up with our learning journey. We had a class with Lalo so we have lots of words and phrases to share. As well, we are planning a trip to Oaxaca and in doing so had to navigate making the travel arrangements in Spanish over email. This posed a challenge but we got through it and share our tips on how you can navigate these situations also.

This week we recap some of our recent learning challenges including a video chat where Ben helped Lalo with some questions about his blog and Jennie who made a few new bilingual friends at a nearby park.

Over the past year, we've learned a ton about raising a bilingual child, including what we need to do as parents to try and keep up! This week Jennie shares her lessons and resources for raising a child bilingual and how to adjust everything from how you speak to your child to the cartoons you watch.

On this episode we talk a lot about the past few weeks of learning as well as some of the encounters we've had trying to speak Spanish in real life. Ben was up in Santa Barbara for some work and had a few opportunities to speak Spanish while Jennie stayed home watching Novelas and eating ice cream. Okay that last part isn't true, but we do talk about novelas in this show as well as an upcoming law/proposition in California that would open up schools ability to run more bilingual programs.

We hear a lot from people that they're scared to cross the border and visit Tijuana and Baja California. In this episode, we share our experiences and some research we've done to help understand this fear better.

Ben just got back from his trip to Mexico city so we sat down to hear how it went. Ben was there with his brother for his bachelor party (Despedida de Soltero) and visited many areas, the huge park Chapultepec, and enjoyed a ton of great food.

This week Ben interviews a former colleague and friend of his with a unique backstory. Jonathan Zaidman comes from a family that immigrated to Mexico years ago after being turned down by the United States when they were fleeing their homes in eastern Europe for fear of persecution.

We're so excited to share with you our recent trip down to Valle de Guadalupe! If you're not familiar, this is Baja's burgeoning wine country that sits just east of Ensenada about 1.5hrs south of San Diego.

This week we give some updates in our learning journey including trying to get a SENTRI pass, Spanish play dates, making reservations in Spanish, and using some new apps to help build vocabulary.

This week we recount a trip we went on early in our Spanish learning journey to Nicaragua. Often for Jennie's birthday the weather here in San Diego is pretty rainy so we end up traveling, this time to an amazing tropical destination and surf paradise.

This week Jennie and Ben went to a local Mexican restaurant in Barrio Logan, a very authentic Mexican area near downtown San Diego. At the restaurant they had a really authentic experience ordering, eating, and chatting w/ the ladies making all the food.

This week we get to hear from Jennie's cousin, Michael Field, who went through a Spanish immersion program as a child and is planning an upcoming study abroad in South America. Michael started his journey at an early age of 5 years old when his parents enrolled him in a Spanish immersion school in Portland, Oregon.