Zane Dickens Last updated: May 20, 2023

Believe Your Ears: These 7 Advanced Spanish Podcasts Will Get You Fluent Faster

It’s time to up your Spanish game.

Now you need something tougher. You need something that challenges and stretches your Spanish abilities out to their limits.

You need something that fits into your schedule but is still intensive enough to push you to achieve Spanish fluency.

7 Advanced Spanish Podcasts That Will Get You Fluent Faster
Immersion Is Key to Speaking Spanish Like a Native

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I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.

Ernest Hemingway

Listening is key to understanding people, situations and more. It’s also key to understanding how a language works. When the goal in mind is to speak like a native Spanish speaker, ambitious learners often get caught up trying to talk all the time.

Talking constantly isn’t necessary to achieve fluent Spanish speaking skills.

Oh, no—quite the opposite.

To demonstrate, we’ve assembled 7 of the very best Spanish podcasts out there.

Each one has something a little special and unique about it. Every single one will push your Spanish learning farther. These are all great if you’ve been learning for a long time and are approaching fluency, but just need that little extra push to get there.

Start listening, and see how far your ears can take you.

7 Advanced Spanish Podcasts That Will Get You Fluent Faster

1. Spanish Obsessed — Advanced

We’ve mentioned this brilliant podcast before, but now we’re focusing on their more advanced episodes. In these episodes you’ll find 100% natural, flowing Spanish conversations. These conversations are held between a range of Spanish speakers, with different accents and local lingo from Colombia, Cuba, Mexico and Spain.

They cover a broad range of topics and publish one podcast per week. The podcasts are all available for download, along with their accompanying transcripts, after you’ve signed up.

2. Lightspeed Spanish — The Advanced Speaker Podcast

Lightspeed offers free Spanish podcasts to take your Spanish to the next level.

They have different levels of podcasts, but you’ll probably want to focus on their Advanced Speaker podcast.

The podcasts themselves are a few years old, but they’re still bursting with language learning goodness. They deal with advanced tenses in the language, aspects of culture such as food and cooking and even interview a full-time Spanish footballer.

In later episodes they’ve got Spanish jokes and funny stories which will have you laughing and learning at the same time.

3. Nómadas — A Weekly Adventure Around The World

This amazing weekly RTVE podcast invites you to explore a different part of the world with each episode.

It’s one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to in any language. Each episode is the next best thing to actually being present in the featured country.

You’ll be taken along on a vast virtual journey full of voices, sounds and music that allow your imagination to fill in the blanks with places, faces, aromas and flavors. They include every imaginable audio element from music to nature sounds, interviews, virtual tours, stories, histories as well as snippets of conversation in the local dialect.

My personal favorites are the episodes where they interview locals who speak Spanish as their second language. It’s very interesting to hear Spanish spoken with so many different accents!

A few interesting episodes to get you started: Las Seychelles: granito, selva y mar and Nueva York en Navidad.

4. Notes In Spanish — Advanced Spanish Audio

Still hungry for more?

Well, Notes In Spanish has nearly 100 advanced episodes on myriad different topics from adoptions cases in Argentina to a story about how a Royal cattle trail has unfortunately slipped into becoming a shanty town.

Ben and Marina deliver high level Spanish discussions covering culture, conversation and all the cool words they never teach you in class. With so many episodes, there’s surely something for everyone.

A top quality resource, this podcast has been mentioned in both The New York Times and Lonely Planet. Each episode is available for download directly from the website.

5. Un Idioma Sin Fronteras — Language and Literature of Spain

In this podcast from RTVE, the hosts deal with Spanish being a language without borders.

They focus on current information about the Spanish language and Spanish literature as well as news, culture, awards and conferences. The podcast also provides listeners with numerous tips on how to express themselves better in Castilian Spanish.

This podcast has been broadcasting daily for 14 years, so there’s a lot of material there for you to sink your teeth into.

6. Fallo de Sistema — All Things Geek

For all the geeks out there, this podcast showcases all the very best comic books, video games, fantasy and science fiction novels and movies. Mixed in with these are interviews with authors, scientists and even philosophers. There’s always something different in each episode, from clips to movies, video games and interesting songs.

7. Radio Ambulante — Stories of People and Places

Radio Ambulante is a Spanish language podcast that tells stories of people and places throughout the United States and Latin America. They work with a community of storytellers and radio producers to bring these stories to life and to the air every week.

Immersion Is Key to Speaking Spanish Like a Native

You can learn something as complicated and nuanced as a language just by listening.

That’s because you can become very familiar with how the language is spoken this way.

If you listen to Spanish enough, then you’ll start thinking in Spanish. By the time you’re thinking in Spanish, you’ll open your mouth and nearly-fluent Spanish should emerge without a second thought.

When travelling in a foreign country, you have the opportunity to learn Spanish faster by listening to locals and other travelers speaking the language. You can also pick up a few things from context and by asking questions. In this way, you’re able to be immersed in the culture and language through simple everyday conversations.

But when you’re back home, this isn’t always an easy thing to do.

It’s not as easy to find people who speak advanced or fluent Spanish in your neighborhood. Chasing down a Spanish-speaking stranger who you pass on the street, just to speak to them, doesn’t always give off the best first impression. Add to this all the busyness of daily life: work, commuting, chores, social time, housework and generally keeping things in order.

It’s almost impossible to get sufficient Spanish practice—no less immerse yourself 100%.

You have to find ways to fit in Spanish practice in your pre-existing daily routine. Fortunately, there’s lots of ways to do this. You could swap out your workout music with Spanish pop hits, watch native-language videos on YouTube, listen to a Spanish-language podcast during your commute or binge-watch videos on a virtual immersion platform like FluentU. All these little bits of practice are going to add up.

You can also choose to use one well-rounded program to help you with every part of language learning, if you prefer not to switch up your routine to much. The aforementioned FluentU program, for example, has authentic videos like movie clips and music videos for listening practice.

But that’s not all: It also has accurate Spanish subtitles (reading practice) with words that can be defined in-video or added to flashcard decks (vocabulary acquisition), quizzes for each video and flashcard deck (comprehension, writing and speaking practice) and detailed grammar information for each word, in the context that you found it in (grammar practice).

FluentU is available for iOS and Android, or you can just use it directly in your browser.

At the end of the day, listening to Spanish language podcasts or engaging in any kind of immersive learning can be a great way to keep your passion for language engaged and get yourself to fluency.

With these amazing podcasts in your arsenal, your Spanish will grow in leaps and bounds.

As you immerse yourself in the language, the culture and the moments of everyday life captured in these podcasts, Spanish will become more and more firmly entrenched in your mind.

You might even find yourself merrily talking to yourself in Spanish while you finish off the dishes!