Nokia N96 Test Drive Episode 3 – Coffee Break Spanish

Orhhh … Look at this dreamy picture of that one true beauty, don’t you want to … take one home?  I love listening to podcast on the Nokia Nseries.  It enables me to download video and audio episodes in the morning wirelessly through my home network way before Apple has figured out how to implement wi-fi connectivity into their over-hyped, overpriced products.

And as this lifestyle continuous, years later today, I am counting on my Nokia N96 to save me from failing an examination that I cannot fail.  If you notice, I have not been blogging about my Spanish class lately.  Onto level two, though it has not really gotten that much tougher than Beginner 1, my poor foundation seems to have cracked under the weight of these 10 new lessons.  There was no examination at the end of Beginner 1, but there will be an examination at the end of Beginner 2.

Having an examination, in principle, is a great idea.  Who would practice music without a gig?  Would would treasure a computer game without the long wait, long queue, and 8 flights of stairs up?  Who would study … without an examination?

I cannot fail my Spanish examination because:

1. Everyone including Cynthia will move onto Elementary 1 …
2. … while I have to repeat Beginner 2.
3. And I will miss my old classmate a lot …
4. … have to re-take the examination again.
5. And pay an extra S$323.

¡Qué horror!  Time for more green bottle mental booster!

One evening, I was really stressed out.  Cynthia has started listening to a podcast channel called Coffee Break Spanish while I was still staring at the two Spanish books I have bought, but haven’t started reading.  OK, my strategy certainly was not working.  An idea struck me, how about subscribing to that channel that seems to have captivated Cynthia using my new Nokia N96?

The process was so simple that I banged my head onto the table for my procrastination.  I took out my phone, navigated to the podcast application, and entered the phrase Coffee Break Spanish onto the search bar.  And voilà!  80 odd episodes to be downloaded onto my phone with a click of a button from this award-winning beginners’ Spanish show.

Both Cynthia and I love this channel because the pace is good and the presentation of the materials is interesting.  We have gone through 10 episodes in details listening to the Spanish teacher Mark working with his student Kara.  The episodes are packed with exercises for the listeners to orally practice with Mark and Kara, interesting long dialogues to practice our listening, and they do seem to interject the Spanish culture into their materials whenever possible with interesting guests from Spain and Mexico origin.

Speaking as such, let me download the next 10 episodes now.  Wish me luck on the examination!  And you know me.  Pass or fail I will post out the results.  By the way, I notice that Nokia N96 has done a much better job in handling simultaneous download of multiple podcast episodes compares to its predecessor.  And it seems faster too.  I am glad that Nokia N96 comes with 16GB memory (+ another 16GB externally if you want).  I reckon it can fit all 80+ episodes nicely.

Related Tag: More Nokia N96 Test Drive Episodes