Podcasts for Language Learning

I wrote about using podcasts to improve my Russian in a previous post, but I've been having so much fun with them that thought the subject warranted a blog post all its own.

According to Dr. Chaput, one of my Russian professors at Harvard, the best way to improve your speaking fluency is to listen to native speech that you can actually understand. This makes sense when you consider that this is how children learn to speak. In order to achieve this, Dr. Chaput recommended that we watch Poor Nastya (Бедная Настя), a Russian soap opera about the lifestyles of the rich and royal—future Tsar Alexander II, to be precise. Although the show has a historical theme, it’s not exactly the most historically accurate depiction of the Romanov family. Apparently the members of the Russian court were extremely tan. Hmm...

Anyways, I find that I don’t usually have much time to sit down and watch Russian soap operas, so listening to Russian podcasts works better for me. I’m already a big podcast fan (current favorite is NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour), so this fits nicely into my life. I can listen to them when I’m driving or walking, so they keep me pleasantly distracted without requiring a big time commitment. I found that by searching the iTunes podcast directory in Russian, I could find dozens of podcasts. There are tons of podcasts in other languages as well—all you have to do is click on "Podcasts" under LIBRARY on the column on the left of your iTunes window and then click on the Podcast Directory arrow on the lower right.

Right now, I’m regularly listening to the broadcasts of Эхо Москвы (Echo of Moscow), which the home of intelligent talk radio in Russia. They have guests from all over the political spectrum, including liberals, pro-Putinists, and Russian nationalists. (Strangely enough, they are owned by Gazprom. The plot thickens...) The best sources of their programming that I have found are Особое мнение (Personal Opinion) and their Улучшенный фид (The Best Feed), which are both available for free through iTunes.

I should add that I don’t get too stressed about understanding everything in the podcasts. If there’s something particularly interesting that I’ve missed, I’ll go back and listen to it, but otherwise my goal is to follow along without worrying that I caught every word.

I’m a big believer that language learning should be entertaining, so I’ve also found a few movie review podcasts for when I get tired of hearing about the travails of Pussy Riot (which is often). The Russian podcast world is still a bit limited, but there is a fair amount of material out there on iTunes and PodFM.ru.

My latest experiment is listening to a French podcast. Considering that I spent 7 years learning French, I was disappointed that it has atrophied so much. I never seem to have any reason to use French, but it seems like it could come in handy one day.

I found basically the perfect podcast for me, La musique fait l’histoire (Music Makes History). I just listened to my first episode, “Les années disco, les années homo.” As you can probably guess from the untranslated title, it was pretty entertaining! It was a bit weird to realize how much better my listening skills are in Russian now compared to French. No matter how long I study it, sometimes French just sounds like the grown-up voices on Peanuts to me. Happily, the second time I listened to the episode—while killing time in the cell phone lot at Sky Harbor airport—I was much more successful. Once you get used to hearing French again, it just starts to sound like weirdly pronounced English with some different words thrown in. 

What I like about listening to podcasts is that they entertain you enough so that you hardly realize you are learning. So, in addition to improving my French, I also got to hear about about the gay subtext of disco songs from the ‘70s. Spoiler alert: This includes every Village People song! Shocking! There was also the additional amusement of hearing a French professor pronounce the word “funky.”

So, for me podcasts are a free, low-effort form of language maintenance. While zipping around on Valley freeways, I have turned my mom’s hybrid Camry into a big, white, fuel-efficient, language-learning machine!