See our com­plete col­lec­tion How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages,

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 pod­cast called Le Jour­nal en français facile (iTunes — feed — web 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 pod­casts) also has its own night­ly news pro­gram — Langsam gesproch­ene Nachricht­en (iTunes — feed — web 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 (mp3 — web 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.”

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

Because our for­eign lan­guage les­son pod­casts have gen­er­at­ed a lot of inter­est this week, we want­ed to men­tion anoth­er intrigu­ing for­eign lan­guage resource: The Mixxer.

An excel­lent way to learn a lan­guage is to par­tic­i­pate in a lan­guage exchange. Years ago, when I set out to learn French, I went to Paris and found some­one (a French per­son) who want­ed to learn Eng­lish, and we met twice a week and spent one hour speak­ing in Eng­lish, the oth­er hour in French. And, with­out fail, my com­mand of French dra­mat­i­cal­ly improved.

Now you don’t need to trav­el very far to get involved in your own lan­guage exchange. The Mixxer has devel­oped a site where you can find eager lan­guage part­ners, down­load Skype (the soft­ware that lets you talk over the inter­net for free), and then start your bilin­gual exchange.

With this and our col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons, the inter­net will rapid­ly get you up the lan­guage learn­ing curve.