Our story
Jiveworld Español is a collaboration between two teams sharing a core belief in the importance of cross-cultural exchange. Jiveworld wanted to build a self-study app to address the biggest hurdle facing many language learners: understanding native speakers speaking natively. Radio Ambulante had tens of thousands of listeners already using their stories to work on their Spanish, but wanted to offer this community a set of tools to support this learning process. Together we're working to bring the authentic voices of Latin America to new audiences, through their ears.
Our app hosts a selection of audio stories from Radio Ambulante, an award-winning long-form journalism podcast distributed by NPR. These stories are recorded on-site all over Latin America and normally require native-level Spanish fluency to understand, but are now within your reach through the Jiveworld audio player and ear training method.
The player gives you just enough help to keep you on the "edge of understanding": your ear will quickly adapt to different regional accents and styles, and your vocabulary will expand fast. And because our study-relisten cycle is based around your natural concentration span, you can retain more and study longer.
About Radio Ambulante
Radio Ambulante is a Spanish-language podcast, distributed by NPR, that tells Latin American stories from everywhere Spanish is spoken, including the United States. With more than 150 stories, reported from over 20 countries, Radio Ambulante is a sonic portrait of a region in all its complexity. Discover more at radioambulante.org.
About Jiveworld
Jiveworld's mission is to remove cultural barriers by promoting second-language fluency. We saw that while there are many language courses for beginners to achieve a basic competency, there's a lack of effective self-study tools to get them to true fluency. Many learners struggle to understand native speakers speaking natively (as opposed to slow, curated "teacher speak"). In 2018 we developed an original method to address this, working with real-world audio content.