Spanish Dialogues Between 2 Friends: 7 Resources for Chatting with Your Chums
Everyone needs some friends in their lives.
They’re the people who keep you calm when life gets intense.
They’re the people who help you move your couch in exchange for a few slices of pizza.
They’re the people who come running with a fire extinguisher and industrial-strength stain remover when your latest Pinterest project goes terribly awry. They’ll even help you destroy the photo evidence.
But when you’re looking to have authentic Spanish conversations, being friendly isn’t as easy as it is in your native language.
Even if you really like someone and want to be friends, conversational Spanish situations can quickly get sidetracked by a lack of proper spoken Spanish skills.
You don’t have to worry, though: With a little practice, you can be just as friendly in Spanish as you are in your native language.
And one way to practice having dialogues between two people is to study some examples to use as models.
Just use these seven resources for Spanish dialogues between two friends to prepare yourself for fun, friendly interactions—no fire extinguisher required (probably).
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
How to Maximize the Benefits of a Spanish Dialogue Between 2 Friends
Read the dialogue aloud.
Spanish dialogues are useful even if you’re reading silently, but reading aloud packs more of a learning punch.
When you read aloud, not only are you practicing words and phrases, you’re also practicing your pronunciation and speaking skills.
Plus, it might be less intimidating to use what you’ve learned in real-life interactions if you have experience saying it.
Practice reading both roles.
Don’t limit yourself to just one side of the conversation. Try switching roles, or read both roles at the same time.
While doing voices to differentiate between the two characters might not have any major educational benefits (at least, not that research can support), it could make the experience much more fun.
And if you’ve read both roles, you’ll be better prepared to fill either role in common conversational scenarios you may encounter in real life.
Enlist the help of a Spanish-speaking friend and practice together.
You know what makes Spanish conversation practice even better? Actually holding a conversation!
If you enlist a Spanish-speaking friend or a fellow Spanish learner, you two can practice dialogues together.
Not only will this get you more realistic speaking practice, it’ll also allow you to get immediate feedback on how you did.
Switch it up and make sure you each get a chance to do both dialogues. Once you’ve mastered a dialogue, you can put the text away and try to hold a similar conversation naturally, using the dialogue as a framework but also adding your own information!
Target specific scenarios with your dialogues.
Whether you’re looking to learn basic Spanish phrases, master Spanish small talk or prepare for some other scenario, you can select your dialogues to target specific skills and vocabulary.
Since each dialogue usually revolves around one theme, you can select which one to use based on what scenarios you think you’re most likely to encounter.
Use supporting materials to their maximum potential.
Some dialogues are accompanied by additional materials like vocabulary lists, videos and more. The FluentU program, for example, has dual-language subtitles and interactive learning tools to help you get the most of the videos in the media library.
FluentU takes authentic videos—like music videos, movie trailers, news and inspiring talks—and turns them into personalized language learning lessons.
You can try FluentU for free for 2 weeks. Check out the website or download the iOS app or Android app.
Use these study materials to make the dialogues even more powerful learning tools.
Spanish Dialogues Between 2 Friends That Model Conversations
123TeachMe
This resource offers hundreds of Spanish dialogues. The dialogues are conveniently organized into nine different levels, ranging from beginner to advanced.
The trick here is that you’ll need to take a look at each dialogue to find conversations between friends, as they’re not labeled. All this means is that, worst case scenario, you’ll accidentally read a few extra dialogues. Accidental learning still counts as learning!
To get you started, we’ve found some dialogues for conversations between friends. For instance, one dialogue (at a low novice difficulty level) features friendly greetings.
For mid-level advanced students, try another friendly dialogue about a recent election.
Each conversation comes with with text and audio. Lower-level dialogues also feature English translations of the text.
Within the resource section, you’ll also find activities and quizzes to help you practice the vocabulary used in the dialogues.
ISLA
ISLA is a Spanish school in Spain, but they also offer some awesome dialogues as part of the Hablando (Speaking) series that you can use to study interactions. And best of all, many of them are beginner-friendly and most are quite funny.
The goal of the dialogues is to take them beyond the typical scripted conversations that you find on many other websites. Instead of using stiff-sounding sentences, these dialogues use humor and more genuine language to give learners a chance to learn with something closer to a real conversation.
For instance, sports fans may enjoy “Días de fútbol” (“Days of Soccer”), in which friends argue about soccer (scroll down on the linked page to view the video).
ISLA also offers some terrific additional resources. Dialogues come with a video, Spanish-language transcript, English translation, listening comprehension questions and even a printable worksheet that further discusses the dialogue and asks additional questions.
UVic
This beginner’s Spanish course from the the University of Victoria in Canada has some helpful dialogue exercises online and they focus largely on friendly interactions.
For instance, one dialogue features friends discussing weekend plans.
But what makes UVic’s dialogues particularly useful is all the additional resources. Each dialogue features Spanish-language text. However, to test your knowledge, you’ll see several questions on the left side of the screen.
Want more practice? Click the button on the top of the screen that points to the right for additional activities, like fill-in-the-blank exercises, true false quizzes, multiple choice questions and even crossword puzzles.
You can also access an index page for each dialogue (it appears like a sheet of paper in the control bar) that provides grammar and vocabulary information.
If you’d rather just look at a glossary of words used, you can also access this by clicking the icon that looks like an open book.
“The Guardian”
The Guardian is a newspaper based out of the UK, but you might love its Spanish dialogues even more than its news coverage.
Dialogues cover a mixture of topics, including some that take place between friends. For instance, one dialogue is dedicated to gossip!
The format is relatively simple: You get the text of the dialogue, and each line also offers the English translation.
After the conversation, there’s a substantial vocabulary list that features words and phrases used in the dialogue, along with additional expressions that you might use in a similar scenario.
Learn Spanish Naturally
Learn Spanish Naturally is a YouTube channel with dozens of learning videos, including some helpful dialogues.
If you want to prepare for friendly conversations, one great dialogue for beginning students is “Ask a Friend to the Movies in Spanish.” As you hear the audio of the conversation (which is very slow and easy to follow), you’ll see the Spanish text and its English translation.
If you want to practice more on your own, you can also access a full transcript and translation of the dialogue in the video’s description.
Spanish Tutorials
The Spanish Tutorials YouTube channel features hundreds of videos dedicated to teaching Castilian Spanish (cue the oohs and ahhs).
And as you may have guessed, these videos do include some dialogues. In fact, the channel offers a playlist dedicated to dialogues, ranging from five minutes in length to over an hour!
If you’re looking for a dialogue between friends, you can’t go wrong with “Spanish conversation: Going to a Concert Tonight,” in which friends discuss plans to go to a concert.
The videos show the Spanish text and its English translation as you hear slow, clear audio of the conversation.
Bonus Option: Write Your Own!
Yes, you can make your own dialogue for practice and doing so will have some big benefits.
For one thing, writing your own friendly dialogue allows you to focus on vocabulary and grammar rules that you want to target. If you can, have a Spanish-speaking friend, teacher or tutor check your dialogue for accuracy. Seeing what mistakes you made is also a great opportunity to learn.
Additionally, creating the dialogue will give you writing practice.
Once you’re done with your dialogue, you can also use it to practice speaking.
That’s a lot of learning in one dialogue!
So use these seven resources for friendly Spanish dialogues alongside your other learning methods for a great learning team. Make new friends but keep the old: one is silver and the other, oro (gold)!
Download: This blog post is available as a convenient and portable PDF that you can take anywhere. Click here to get a copy. (Download)
And One More Thing…
If you've made it this far that means you probably enjoy learning Spanish with engaging material and will then love FluentU.
Other sites use scripted content. FluentU uses a natural approach that helps you ease into the Spanish language and culture over time. You’ll learn Spanish as it’s actually spoken by real people.
FluentU has a wide variety of videos, as you can see here:
FluentU brings native videos within reach with interactive transcripts. You can tap on any word to look it up instantly. Every definition has examples that have been written to help you understand how the word is used. If you see an interesting word you don’t know, you can add it to a vocab list.
Review a complete interactive transcript under the Dialogue tab, and find words and phrases listed under Vocab.
Learn all the vocabulary in any video with FluentU’s robust learning engine. Swipe left or right to see more examples of the word you’re on.
The best part is that FluentU keeps track of the vocabulary that you’re learning, and gives you extra practice with difficult words. It'll even remind you when it’s time to review what you’ve learned. Every learner has a truly personalized experience, even if they’re learning with the same video.
Start using the FluentU website on your computer or tablet or, better yet, download the FluentU app from the iTunes or Google Play store. Sign up by November 28th to receive a 60% discount with our Black Friday sale!
