Podcasting and news topics language comparison

by Stan Krejcirik
(Czech Republic)

I very often use podcasting, which represents a really very good way and source of learning languages. Its advantage: you may choose to download and listen to programmes you are really interested in (nature, scince, literature, medicine, language learning, FREE language courses etc.), which supports your MOTIVATION TO LEARN.

The best and most suitable podcasts are usually produced by professional radio stations because of their sound and style quality (you see, such stations use professional speakers, which I find very important for language comprehension). For beginners, I could not recommend podcasts by bloggers because of their very often neglected pronunciation and bad sound quality.

I also use short news compared by languages to get more vocabulary without looking up in dictionaries. First you get a world news item you're interested in, in your own language, and then you search its counterpart in a language you're learning (e.g. our local Czech newspaper has a news item about big air crash in Africa so I download the item and then find the same item in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch... newspapers. Finally I compare the vocabularies and learn).

As usual, if the news comes from a leading news agency, the vast majority of newspapers worldwide translate and publish it in original wording so the result is you get 1:1 translation.

Learning vocabulary is best for me to do by means of the internet: if you need a vocabulary concerning e.g. HOSPITAL, then you probably find as many words as possible on a web of a hospital. To memorize them easily , take a piece of paper and pencil and MINDMAP the vocabulary using labels (buttons and menus on the webpage).

Webs are normally tree-structured and mindmapping, in fact, uses the same principle.If you need a vocabulary you could not get there, visit another web with the same or similar topic.