Language Journal #2: Podcasts and Progress

Oi pessoal! This week has been very unproductive as far as language learning goes. Between work, studying for the professional engineering examination, and buying a house, I haven’t had the energy or motivation to practice. What I have been doing, however, is listening to language podcasts. There are some interesting language podcasts on iTunes. Among those, I recommend you check out the following two:

• I Will Teach You A Language
• Language Mastery

I Will Teach You A Language features weekly advice from Ollie Richards for language learners. In the podcast, he usually tackles questions asked by his listeners, or holds interviews with other language learners/polyglots. Language Mastery is almost exclusively an interview podcast, although their interviews are more in-depth (and longer) than the interviews held at I Will Teach You A Language. What’s good about both podcasts is that you’ll find advice for almost every aspect of language learning, from finding resources to maintaining proficiency. At the moment, I think Language Mastery is discontinued, but if you’re a first-time listener, there’s hours of material available on iTunes podcasts.

When I’m not listening to language learning advice, I’m usually listening to news in my target languages. The podcasts that I’m currently listening to are:

• DW em Português para África
• euronews radio italiano
• Rimasun – Quechua Language Podcasts

DW em Português para África is not a Brazilian Portuguese podcast. The news here are mostly related to African or European countries, therefore they use a lot of terms that I don’t recognize or know about, so I think it’s good listening practice. This way, I can practice paying attention and attempting to recognize unknown words (maybe by relating their stem to a similar word). Another thing that I like about this podcast is that they interview people from different countries, so I get to listen to Portuguese, Angolan, and Brazilian accents, among others. Euronews Radio Italiano is an European news podcast in Italian (as the name describes). I like listening to this podcast as it covers more international news, and since they use terms and names that I’m familiar with, it’s easier for me to follow. I’m definitely not at a level where I can understand everything, but I think it’s still a good way to train my ear. Rimasun is a Quechua language podcast recorded in the United States which features interviews in Quechua. While not technically a news podcast, the interviews normally concern current social or environmental issues. I can only understand a few words or particles per podcast, so I normally can’t follow along, but I’m trying to get used to the accent and pronunciation.

Those are the five podcast that I generally listen to during the day (well, aside from politics podcasts). I occasionally listen to several languagePod101 podcasts, but they’re not at the top of my favorites list.Some of these podcasts do provide good learning resources, which I’ll talk about some other time. Well, that’s all for today, I hope that these podcast will help you with your language learning journey. Tchau!