Pricing: $12 per month or $99 per year

Positives

Tailored for advanced Spanish learners
Great comprehension focus
Assisted reader concept
Pure native speaker dialogue

Negatives

Way overpriced
Topics may be uninteresting for some

Summary

Lupa's an advanced Spanish literacy app for iOS and Android that teaches listening and reading comprehension using Radio Ambulante episodes. It's essentially an assisted reader with interactive text and hints.

Try it here

Alternatives

Let’s face it: Spanish apps and courses have been done to death.

Most products these days lack innovation and seem to target the same learner demographic (beginner) and recycle learning trajectories and methods.

Lupa is a breath of fresh air for intermediate to advanced learners.

This is an app by Jiveworld and Radio Ambulante (NPR) that is tailored specifically for improving listening comprehension of authentic Spanish (Latin American).

It’s kind of reminiscent of LingQ as an assisted reader, but what it does differently is follow the text as it reads an NPR story, while hiding chunks of the text to force you to listen closely.

You can tap on words to see expanded definitions or save the word for later memorization.

The audio quality is outstanding with 100% local, natural Spanish (different flavors from all over Latin America).

The biggest downside to Lupa is its price: way too expensive for what it offers.

But it’s so nice to see an app that targets advanced learners AND the most difficult language skill (under-represented in most apps), listening comprehension.

Overall, a very handy tool that I highly recommend (but do check out my alternatives).