Lifehack for Learning Foreign Languages

langsam.jpg

Here is a quick “life­hack” for you. You can now learn for­eign lan­guages and stay cur­rent on pol­i­tics all at once. How so? By tak­ing advan­tage of a smart pod­cast con­cept being used by French and Ger­man broad­cast­ers. Radio France Inter­na­tionale (RFI) issues a dai­ly pro­gram called Le Jour­nal en français facile (iTunesfeedweb site), which deliv­ers the night­ly inter­na­tion­al news in slow and easy-to-under­stand French. Along the same lines, the Ger­man media com­pa­ny Deutsche Welle (which puts out many great lan­guage and music pro­grams) also has its own night­ly news pro­gram Langsam gesproch­ene Nachricht­en (iTunesfeedweb site). It’s essen­tial­ly the same con­cept: infor­ma­tive news pre­sent­ed in very sim­ple Ger­man, and, in this case, it’s spo­ken very slow­ly.

Now, what’s very nice about these pro­grams is that they also pro­vide a writ­ten tran­script of the spo­ken word. So you can read along as you lis­ten and make sure that you’re real­ly com­pre­hend­ing. (See tran­scripts in French and Ger­man). Even cool­er, with the Ger­man ver­sion, if you have a video iPod, you can read the tran­script on your lit­tle portable screen. (See direc­tions).

Final­ly, check out this off­beat sug­ges­tion sent our way by a read­er: Nun­tii Lati­ni (mp3web site) is “a week­ly review of world news in Clas­si­cal Latin, the only inter­na­tion­al broad­cast of its kind in the world, pro­duced by YLE, the Finnish Broad­cast­ing Com­pa­ny.”

To learn more lan­guages, please vis­it our com­plete col­lec­tion Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Beyond.

Relat­ed Resource: See our arti­cle called “Cof­fee Break Span­ish & The Threat to Tra­di­tion­al Media


by | Permalink | Comments (2) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (2)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • I think your advice is excel­lent. Learn­ing a lan­guage is a con­tin­u­ous, every­day hap­pen­ing. You learn lit­tle-by-lit­tle. I firm­ly believe in read­ing tar­get nov­els you have pre­vi­souly read in your own lan­guage. Good idea! How­ev­er, I don’t know about you, but I don’t favour dual lan­guage books. This only leads to lazy read­ing.

  • This pro­gram offers
    to every­body who would like to study dif­fer­ent lan­guages. It is very essen­tial
    thing to learn this mat­ter because you would able ben­e­fit from it. You can use
    it when trav­el­ing.

  • In learn­ing a for­eign lan­guage might takes time and even­tu­al­ly not easy. This will take enough time and indeed requires deter­mi­na­tion in learn­ing.

  • AED kopen says:

    In some oth­er school insti­tu­tions all over the world, they are includ­ing dif­fer­ent
    lan­guages as their sub­ject. Def­i­nite­ly it is hard for stu­dents to learn at
    first. How­ev­er as the time goes by, they can learn from it and sure­ly they
    would able to use it their future careers.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.