{"id":857,"date":"2012-09-02T17:02:34","date_gmt":"2012-09-03T00:02:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=857"},"modified":"2012-09-02T17:02:34","modified_gmt":"2012-09-03T00:02:34","slug":"podthoughts-la-casa-rojas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=857","title":{"rendered":"Podthoughts: La Casa Rojas"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/center><\/p>\n

Vital stats:<\/strong>
\nFormat: a man speaks of many things \u2014 in Spanish
\nEpisode duration: 5m-30m
\nFrequency: maybe not a going concern, but 71 episodes exist<\/p>\n

So here\u2019s one entirely in Spanish. If you don\u2019t understand that language, I won\u2019t stop you scrolling on, but if you understand even a little bit of it \u2014 or if you want to understand all of it \u2014 you might consider having a listen. On La Casa Rojas<\/em><\/a> [RSS<\/a>] [iTunes<\/a>], the Peruvian-born, St. Paul-based Spanish teacher Luis Rojas talks about events in his life, events in the world at large, events in history, and the many vagaries of language-learning. A simple premise, to be sure, but I listen to a great many language podcasts, and at least half of them complicate themselves straight out of usefulness. This one has held to a certain purity. You want to learn Spanish? Then hey, listen to a man speak Spanish for a while.<\/p>\n

Put the foreign linguistic element aside \u2014 not that it makes much sense to do so here \u2014 and this show would seem to follow a common but usually unfortunate podcasting form: some guy talking about stuff. But even when I began listening, my Spanish rusted to near-uselessness, the impressive friendliness of Rojas\u2019 personality shone through. You don\u2019t realize the rarity of this until you hear it; I get the sense that most podcasters, eager to quickly scrape together whatever audience they can, affect sour pusses and hope to gather listeners under the banner of common (if exaggerated) prejudices. The strain of this charade, I would guess, has become a leading cause of the disease known as podfade<\/a>. But Rojas comes across as a genuinely friendly, open fellow, just the sort of person you hope for when you know you\u2019ll miss some to most of the meaning of each sentence spoken. Should I go to a word like \u201cavuncular\u201d here? Or perhaps the closest Spanish equivalent I can find, the awfully literal \u201cde t\u00edo\u201d?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the whole thing at Maximum Fun<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Vital stats: Format: a man speaks of many things \u2014 in Spanish Episode duration: 5m-30m Frequency: maybe not a going concern, but 71 episodes exist So here\u2019s one entirely in Spanish. If you don\u2019t understand that language, I won\u2019t stop you scrolling on, but if you understand even a little bit of it \u2014 or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-857","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-podthoughts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=857"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":860,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/857\/revisions\/860"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=857"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=857"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=857"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}