Soundbites are short, listening-focused language lessons embedded within Jiveworld Stories. The magic of Soundbites lies in the three-tier structure: an intriguing challenge, an audio story excerpt accompanied by vocabulary and transcription, and an informative reveal — all inside the patented Jiveworld assisted-listening player.
For example, one Soundbite, from a story set in Costa Rica, focuses on the word "tuanis," a very common slang in that region. In the reveal it explains how "tuanis" is just the word "buenos" that has undergone a cipher (or pig-latin) invented in the 19th century by General Francisco Malespín from El Salvador. 'T' becomes 'B', 'A' becomes 'E', and so on. It then asks the learner to decode other popular Malespín slang derived from other common Spanish words.
While both Stories and Soundbites feature Latin American storytellers from the acclaimed Radio Ambulante podcast, Stories range in length and Soundbites keep it short - often no more than 30 seconds long. Completing the Challenge – the exercise that accompanies each Soundbite – takes about 4 minutes.
Crafted by Jiveworld's linguistics team, the Challenge prompts you to listen for certain aspects of the audio clip related to the category being explored. When you're ready, reveal not just the answer but in-depth insights on culture and history, grammar rules and how people break them, different ways to swear, and wonderment of this rich and complex language that’s spoken across regions, nations, and continents.
Soundbites can be consumed as standalone lessons – for when you don’t have a whole lot of time – or they can be studied within a story to boost your learning beyond mere comprehension.
Soundbites are designed to make you think like a linguist. They are organized into eight categories: spoken accents, vernacular, history and culture, social strategies, vocabulary, grammar, patterns, and idioms.
