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Cadena Ser is an all-news/all-talk radio station in Spain. Once a week on the program “La ventana,” they invite a group of children to talk about recent news events. It’s a round-table discussion of pint-sized talking heads. This podcast is an excerpt from a recent discussion they had with the kids.

The children are quite precocious and have done their homework. They talk about the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, bullfighting in Spain and even about the capture of some terrorists. But some of the kids don’t always have their facts straight, which makes for some interesting and very amusing listening.

There isn’t a transcript available for this but here are some key vocabulary words and explanations of some of the items you will hear the children talking about. In the 10-minute clip you will hear them discuss the following topics: the earthquakes in Chile and Haiti, flooding in Spain, the huge waves that hit a cruise ship in the Mediterranean (the kids call it a tsunami, although it wasn’t technically a tsunami), a  ship trapped in the ice in the Baltic Sea, animal cruelty, SpongeBob SquarePants and the animated movie “UP.”

terremoto – earthquake

placas - plates (in this case, tectonic plates)

provocan – they cause

derrumbar – to collapse

inundación – flood, flooding

*maldita sea – damn it! (Spain has a more relaxed attitude about swearing and cursing, so it’s not considered as vulgar or crude as in English.)

atascado – stuck, stalled

¡Ostras, qué guay! - Gosh, how cool!

País Vasco – the Basque Country

In Spanish, some native speakers call the U.S.A. “USA” pronouncing it as a word instead of as separate letters. So when you hear the kids talk about “usa” they are talking about the United States.

ETA are the initials of a Basque separatist group which has killed and injured hundreds of people in Spain and France.  Last week Spanish and French officials captured three of ETA’s top leaders. One of them had recently returned from training with a communist terrorist group called FARC in Venezuela.

One of the children confuses this recent news with something else she must have heard her parents talking about. Who knows. In any case, she incorrectly says that the ayuntamiento (town council)  of a Basque village is selling weapons to the United States and providing escondites (hiding places, hideouts) to Americans. That isn’t true, of course. The child confuses recent news about ETA with the U.S., at one point even referring to the United States as UTA.

una corrida de toros – bullfight

residencia - an old folk’s home

un niño pesado – an annoying boy