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So many Podcasts … How to use? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5018 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 14 19 October 2012 at 2:55pm | IP Logged |
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There certainly is no shortage of free (as well as paid) podcast sites. These include numerous languages. The
format is very comparable in the ones I have examined. The question I'm raising is to those who have used this format for learning, how did you go about it? To wit, these programs seem to have a short (sometimes very short exchange) that is then discussed between moderators. They seem to target people who may listen to one "podcast" a day, maybe repeating the next day as needed. However, this seems to be a rather "slow" way to progress; and yet I don't have enough language learning experience to know for sure. If I wanted to put more time in per day studying, would it be better to listen to multiple episodes, repeat same episode several times, mix new and repeat old, etc? I suppose this would be somewhat dependent on "learning style" but I wanted to get a feel for what the people here thought. Additionally, if anyone has particular praise (or critique) of specific podcast sites, please chime in! Thank you as always for any insight. RogueMD 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 2 of 14 19 October 2012 at 3:03pm | IP Logged |
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Obligatory link to my ChinesePod method.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 14 19 October 2012 at 3:18pm | IP Logged |
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What languages are you interested in?
I used podcasts a fair bit at one stage of my Japanese learning. Typically, I would listen to 2 or 3 in a row when commuting (needed noise-cancelling headphones for that), then move one up and drop the last one. This way, I ended up listening to each 2 or 3 times. From what I can tell, the early level ones (such as the ones I've been listening to for Mandarin lately) can sometimes be excrutiatingly slow and repetitive. If I'm using a computer to listen, I'll bump up the speed a good 10% or so, and I'll sometimes skip certain parts. If I hear the dialogue and I get it all, I jump to the next lesson. Otherwise, it becomes like a classroom where you are listening to things you already know. In short, there is no perfect way to use podcasts -- but there's probably an ideal way for you, considering the way you learn, when you use them, how distracted you are at that time, etc. Make them work for you, not the other way around. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5015 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 4 of 14 19 October 2012 at 4:53pm | IP Logged |
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My methods.
Listening one time to a 50 minutes episode. Loop listening 5 times to a 10 minutes episode. Opening the podcast in Audacity and if I don't understand something I will loop listening an extract as short as one second long as many times as need for me to understand it or if I still don't get it until I am tired with this particular extract which I will understand better the next time - I hope. In all cases I will listen to a podcast many times - my goal being to listen to the language itself I will avoid all explanation and comments (which are interesting but I do not like to listen to those as many times as I am listening to the language. These comments are often in English which is also foreign to me and so this help me with my English. At an early stage I prefer podcasts with transcript - later it is less important and I will listen to thing create for native people - even if I don't understand everything. I like La rosa de los vientos and hablando en plata. I aslo like some audio books and sound track recording from tv series - some of wish I have both in English and Spanish - others I already know in french and others totally new to me. One thing I don't like in the courses is when they repeat the same thing too many times - totally useless since I will repeat the podcast if I need. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| HMS Senior Member England Joined 5105 days ago 143 posts - 256 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 14 19 October 2012 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
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I have found the Deutsche Welle podcasts helpful. Apart from the awful, frequent musical interludes. I would rather have a podcast 30 seconds long than 5 minutes long laced with 4 minutes of crap.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Michel1020 Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 5015 days ago 365 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 14 20 October 2012 at 9:15am | IP Logged |
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I often delete interludes with Audacity.
I also forgot to talk about the speed factor. Now and then I listen to a podcast at slower or faster speed. I do this with VLC. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5018 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 7 of 14 22 October 2012 at 1:29am | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your responses!
The Podcasts are interesting. Lots of short "language bits" … sometimes very interestingly arranged … and difficult to navigate. I think the format is overall good … but not necessarily geared to "rapid" learning. Definitely a tool I will try to develop. Onward…. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4699 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 8 of 14 24 October 2012 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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I doubt podcasts alone will enable you to learn "rapidly" beyond the newbie stages. They're useful in many ways, though and learning a language will take a long time regardless - unless you're learning, say, Spanish as a French, or Dutch as a German.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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