Do you have time to listen to podcast’s and want to learn French? Here’s a quick rundown on the most popular French learning podcast and my review on them taking into account that you may only have time to listen and not read any other accompanying materials.

Learn French by Podcast

These may be the best French language learning lessons in podcast format. The format is of a conversation that is in dissected and analyzed with enough repetition to really pick a lot of it up. Each episode is around 15 minutes and the subject matter can be engaging. Of course you have the option to pick and choose which episodes you want to listen to. New ones come out every week or so though not on any schedule. They are currently up to almost 80 episodes.

FrenchPodClass

I like this one a lot although I could do without the theme song that is played at the beginning and end of every episode. It gets annoying when you’re listening to success of episodes and you have to listen to the theme song twice in a row. The speakers accent may be a bit hard to understand but he does have a good habit of repeating most of what he says in both French and English. Hopefully you will understand one or the other and maybe learn some vocabulary from hearing the translation.

This one is also good and is up to almost 90 episodes. Each episode is quite long, around 45 minutes. They play a lot of music in each episode and I suppose it helps to pay the bills because you are asked to buy the music to their site at Amazon.com. This is fine if you enjoy French music and have an interest in discovering more. Music can be a way to learn a language (French techno may be an exception) depending on how well the annunciation of the lyrics is.

Daily French Pod

As the name implies this is a daily French podcast and perfect if you need something new every day, say for the morning commute. Episodes are short and to the point, often covering current events. There is some dependence on the written transcript materials, so it’s not perfect for those trying to learn solely by listening in their cars.

RFI - Journaux francais facile

I can’t recommend this enough. It’s not exactly a podcast, and it’s not in the format of lessons. It’s basically the daily news from Radio France International condensed to about 10 minutes and spoken in French using vocabulary that intermediate French language learners will find it easy to understand. It’s probably a bit slower with more careful pronunciation then you would find on a regular news program. You can also read some of the transcripts to pick up words you didn’t get.

World Languages Podcasting French Podcast

And this is a new podcast from an Australian perspective. There is no English used nor are they really even French lessons. They are basically just conversations in French about Australian culture. Intermediate knowledge of the French language is required.

Yo La La

I said above that sometimes you can learn language through the music. This is something he like and you like hip-hop, this podcast is about the French rap scene. Rather than a practical way to learn French, this is more a jumping off point for exploring French urban music.

Lingomania’s French For Beginners

I really cannot recommend this as it is only available if you pay. Otherwise you only get a short annoying commercial for each episode.

Learn Latin by listening to a podcast? Now you can with the Latinum Latin Language Learning Podcast which currently has many episodes for you to download.

Many of the episodes are of classical readings but here’s an example of how some episodes are laid out:

Learning French is much easier if you already know another Romance language such as Spanish or Italian. Even already knowing English helps a lot since so many words were borrowed from French and English. Is there anything similar for Chinese? Well, actually, many Asian countries that were once under the influence of China borrowed many words from their language so Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese all contain many Chinese loan words. Of those three languages, which all he used to use a writing system based on the Chinese system, only Japanese retains that feature. What that means is if you were to learn Japanese before learning Chinese you would already know a huge amount of the characters, although Japanese also uses two syllabic alphabets that are loosely based on but not used in the Chinese system. Also there are some characters that are only used in one or the other. But for the most part you would already understand the meaning of much written Chinese and you would have a butchered pronunciation of it.

This is partly due to divergence an pronunciation between modern Mandarin and the language that was spoken when the Japanese originally borrowed the words. But memorizing some rules can help you translate the Japanese approximate pronunciation into modern Mandarin. The Shanghainese dialect is more close to the language that was spoken back then and so more word have the same pronunciation today as in Japanese today. For example, grape is pronounced “budo” in both Japanese and Shanghainese and person, “nin”, and two ,”ni”. So out of all the regions in China Shanghai may be the best place to locate if you already know Japanese as many of the people who wield power in that region still speak that dialect. If you ever need to call for help remember that telephone is “dianhua” in Chinese whereas in Japanese it is “denwa”.

Having trouble telling it all apart? Take the test to see if you really can tell the difference between Chinese, Japanese, and Korean people and scenes.

Why learn Mandarin Chinese?

China’s economy is the seventh largest in the world but that’s only according to the Chinese who may be being modest for several reasons.  City governments report smaller numbers to the national government to get more aid or subsidies and the Chinese currency itself is pegged to the US dollar which artificially lowers its value relative to other major currencies which have made huge gains against the dollar in recent years.  China wants to keep their currency, the yuan, low to keep the price of their goods cheap so Americans can buy them.  So China’s economy may already be less than an order of magnitude, at least half of the United States.  And it is going at or near a double-digit percentage rate annually.

Likewise, the Chinese government may be underreporting the population of its country.  Its figure of 1.3 billion is 200 million mouths less than outside agencies believe, a discrepancy that is two thirds the size of the United States.  Even at this lower figure you will be able to speak the same language as one quarter of the population of the planet.

China is attracting more foreign investment than any other country including the US.  It’s a great place to invest for many reasons.

By 2020 Chinese tourists will rank fourth in the world so you may not even need to travel to China to make use of the languages.  There are already 85 million Chinese who can afford to travel but where should they go?  Detroit, Cancun, Vancouver?

Have you ever wondered why the Japanese calendar system has seven days just like we have all over the West and why the meetings of Sunday and Monday seemingly match up (”sun” day and “moon” day) while the rest of the Japanese days are so different from what we use in English or in any Latin-based language? The Japanese words for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, kayōbi, suiyōbi, mokuyōbi kin’yōbi, and doyōbi, basically mean “fire day”, “water day”, “wood day”, “gold day”, and “earth day”. In Latin-based languages, such as French Mardi (think “Mardi Gras” or Fat Tuesday), Mercredi, Jeudi, Vendredi, and Samedi, the names are based on the planets Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In English, we get some of the names from Norse gods (Wednesday comes from Odin’s Day and Thursday comes from Thor’s Day). The Roman names for the planets are also names of their gods.

It turns out that the Asian system, the Chinese words that are also the basis for the Japanese and Vietnamese day names, is also based on the same planets. While “ka” and “sui” mean “fire” and “water” in Japanese they also mean Mars and Mercury among other things. The rest of the days also match up with the same planets that the ancient Greeks and Romans used.

So there you have it. Memorize the five innermost planets that the ancients knew about in the order that they saw them and you can pretty much recognize the days of the week in any Romance language and learn their translation into either Japanese, Chinese, or Vietnamese and you should be able to recognize the days of the week in Japanese because the words are all cognate although the Chinese and Vietnamese systems no longer uses the same words.

Click here for more.

Grammar Girl’s Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing is a podcast on English grammar. Advanced students of the English language, both native speakers and second language hackers, will find her dissection of borderline obscure English grammar topics interesting. Recent topics have included serial commas, regional dialects, and Spoonerisms. The discussion on mondegreens (phrases that have been misheard) and eggcorns (a homonym of acorn which explains the phenomena by example) should be interesting for anybody learning French which is full of eggcorns.

Welcome to Language Hack, a new blog for anyone interested in languages and learning languages, whether it be French, English, Chinese, Japanese, or maybe you Latin or Esperanto or even Python or PHP.  There are peculiarities to learning each language but also commonalities to learning all languages.  Let’s explore both.  Find how languages are related to each other and see how much borrowing happens in languages like English (a Germanic language with a heavily French lexicon but with really no unified orthographic [spelling] system due to the high variety of loan words from so many different languages).

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.