How do you work with podcasts in your language studies?

Methods and Learning
#1

My weapon of choice is Castbox app. If I’m intermediate+ in the language I just enjoy listening to an episode (when commuting or having coffee in the morning), casually noticing new speech patterns, and writing them down in Keep Notes to look up later.

If it’s a beginner’s level, first of all, I try to get a transcript, I pause the audio more often, pay more attention to new vocab and grammar structures, write them down in original sentences and then create my own examples. Next time I work with a podcast I do a revision listening before starting a new episode. Usually, my beginner podcast session takes 1 hour (with an episode 10-15 min long). Of course, a topic should be interesting and relevant to my tastes otherwise it quickly gets boring…

What are your podcast routines?

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#2

When I was doing Russian and started acquiring enough vocab to start a conversation, I listened to Russian Podcast during my daily commute to the university, one 20-minute episode per week - with three or four repetitions during the week until I can understand 85% of the words then I switched to the next episode.

I don’t do transcripts though as I make up on that through other approaches…

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#3

My podcast routine is near exact to yours, @Serhiy. Haha!

#4

Your post is making me realize that I should search for some pocasts in my lesser known languages. I usually only listen to ones in my stronger languages. Thanks for sharing your strategies!

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#6

I listen to a podcast from Brazil, called Diversilingua, since I’m trying to improve my Portuguese. For now, I’m simply listening to the episodes and trying to understand everything, but in the future, I may go back to an episode or 2 and try to pick out some vocabulary that I didn’t pick up on the first listen.

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#7

This podcat is amazing! I wish there were other podcasts about language learnings other than in English (or Portuguese like this one).

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#8

Great topic and good to learn from everyone’s approaches here! For Spanish, my listening comprehension is good enough that I can just enjoy the podcasts, a good thing since I don’t have time to actively study Spanish at the moment. I especially like Latinos al extranjero, Epicentro (by Leon Krauze), El Hilo and Radio Ambulante.

For Chinese I’m not there at all yet, but understanding podcasts is my big project of the last four months. For this, transcripts are essential for me otherwise there’s no hope :joy:. My main source has been the 40 minute episodes of Australian radio SBS Mandarin (really interesting guests on the show!) available on language site Lingq. But I’m also trying shorter news podcasts from RFI (radio France international) in Chinese, which have full transcripts!

Related to Heather’s point about weaker languages, for Vietnamese I’m only ten months into studying so I’m far from podcast fun, but I think that in Chinese I made the mistake of “waiting till I’m ready” until I realized I’d never be ready without accepting the pain right now :joy:.

So, for Vietnamese, I decided to get going and not make excuses like I did with Chinese. I’ll describe what I do in case that’s useful to anyone else, or maybe someone can show how I’m wasting my time haha.

RFI has Vietnamese content too but since I’m studying Southern accent (my dad’s!), the standard northern accent is just too much of an added difficulty for now (I learned the hard way once branching out of my usual southern Italki tutors and trying a guy from Hanoi, ouch, I wasn’t ready!!!)

So my approach has been to use two sources of YouTube videos with interesting content AND subtitles in Vietnamese and English. Unfortunately, they’re not the kind you can just pull out from the cc, so I have to write them down myself if I want transcripts I can also just read and study. But for 5 to 15 minute videos, I found the exercise of copying then down myself highly valuable and great to practice typing and/or handwriting (though a bit time consuming). My two sources for that are:

  1. The channel of a magazine called Vietcetera (super interesting short interviews with creatives, entrepreneurs etc), for example
    https://youtu.be/RyDst62vCT4

  2. Cháo Trắng, a YouTube channel producing shorts with a sort of “be better humans” message each time. For example
    https://youtu.be/zgJ2pH9bwhM

I also capture the videos I’m studying as mp3’s so I can just listen any time. And voilà, I have interesting “podcasts” with transcripts in Vietnamese and I can have fun struggling through them. I even share them with my Italki tutor so they’re the basis of practice conversations about interesting topics.

Podcasts have completely transformed my language study over the last four months.

One last thing: check out the incredible mine of A.I. generated podcast transcripts in several languages available for free on Happy Scribe!

Oops, sorry for the long post!

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Steve Kaufmann's LingQ
#9

I’m just getting into trying podcasts in Irish… my dilemma is that transcripts are hard to come by, and most of the advanced podcasts don’t seem to have those and they speak much faster than what I’m used to.
I did recently come across a new news-oriented podcast in Irish (Nuacht Mhall) that states it’s intention to read at a slower pace and I think it comes with a link back to the news article, so I’m going to try that one next.

When I feel brave enough to revisit my rusty Russian without it invading my Irish learning brain, I found a great podcast called Comprehensible Russian | Learn Russian with Max. I did listen to one podcast there and surprised myself with how much I could understand.

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