Picture this: it’s 9 pm, you just arrived home, it’s Friday and you want to relax a little in bed, but instead, there’s that Duolingo alert telling you that you haven’t practiced your Spanish lessons for the past 5 days straight. Again.
You either turn the TV off and dedicate the next 20 minutes to catching up on an app that’s efficient, but boring. Or, you leave the TV on and resume your Spanish lessons with Oswaldo.
Oswaldo is an animated TV show originally created for kids, but it has such easy vocabulary and beautiful animations that you can learn a new language while finding the content interesting and funny.
What’s Oswaldo About?
It is a delight to see how much effort Birdo Studios put into creating Oswaldo. With pastel color palettes, round-faced characters, street objects, and fashion accessories so well sketched, you'll want to print almost every scene.
This type of animation is also very dynamic, meaning if you don’t like anime because many scenes contain frozen images moving slowly from one frame to another, Oswaldo has action going on in almost 90% of the frames, erasing any boredom.
It’s mostly a show about family and friendship values. It narrates the adventures of Oswaldo, a penguin adopted by two humans that now has to interact with all sorts of school drama.
It’s a show that has shiny colors, great animated sequences, really funny jokes, and smoothly mentions social matters kids may be exposed to and need to be taught about.
For example, in Season 1 Episode 3, Oswaldo becomes a very important internet personality. But only for a few hours. This episode exposes the audience to an interesting fact: many children and teens these days want to be YouTubers and/or influencers. Which, of course, if seen with a logical mind and considering 21st century values, is actually quite possible, but how will they learn that fame is temporary?
This kind of content also gives you hints about a kid’s life in this century, which is a great opportunity for parents to approach them and talk about important matters in their lives.
How Can ‘Oswaldo’ Help You Learn Spanish?
This show is great for children who need to learn Spanish quickly, not only because kids nowadays are like sponges and absorb content really fast, but because Oswaldo’s episodes are aimed towards children between ages 5-12, so the reflections and situations portrayed in the show are relevant for that age.
So, if it’s a kids show, why are we telling you to watch it? Because if you are learning a new language or if you consider yourself a beginner, sometimes it's better to begin with the basics, and Oswaldo has interesting content with a very simple yet complete vocabulary. Each episode lasts between 14 to 20 minutes, and there’s so much action it’s really hard to get bored with his adventures.
At LingoPie you can find Oswaldo episodes, select the audio file in Spanish, and play it with Spanish and English subtitles at the same time if you feel like it. Also, if there’s a word you don’t recognize, simply click on it and a text box will show you the meaning. All these words you didn’t know before will be there for you to review every time you click on Oswaldo’s episodes. Check your new words count and take a final quiz to see how much you learn with every episode.
What if you don’t understand what they are saying because it's too fast? No biggie, at LingoPie you can also slow down the video’s speed to catch the correct pronunciation easily. In fact, you can increase your comprehension by 50% of any TV show by slowing down its speed.
May this penguin fly!
Long gone are the days of learning Spanish with old fashioned content and no interaction whatsoever. We truly hope to see more and more of this lovely penguin ‘Oswaldo’. And even though penguins don’t fly, we're sure you will!
In this blog we reviewed Oswaldo, originally a children’s animated series that will help you and them learn Spanish through original content in native Spanish language, corrected and synchronized subtitles, and the feature to review the dialogues of each episode word-by-word.
It is an inspiring and funny show, which is not only capable of entertaining the little ones in the house, but also helping any adult with little Spanish knowledge to catch word games, Spanish linguistic expressions, correct pronunciation, and much more.
Start watching Oswaldo with LingoPie today and have fun while learning Spanish anywhere in the world.
