RadioLingua

Improve your English with Radio Lingua

We're delighted to announce that Write Back Soon, our first podcast aimed at learners of English, is now live. Write Back Soon helps learners master what is often seen as one of the most difficult aspects of the English language, phrasal verbs. To native English speakers concepts such as "to ask for" and "to get through" come as second nature, but learners of English find phrasal verbs notoriously difficult.

Sticking with the tradition of making what seems complicated very straightforward, Write Back Soon will help learners master their phrasal verbs and build confidence in using them through the story of Duncan and Lisa, two Scottish students who are temporarily separated: Lisa is studying in Canada and Duncan is back home in Scotland. Our experienced EFL teacher Gerry will explain exactly how to use the phrasal verbs included in each email between Duncan and Lisa.

Many English learners' first experience with English listening materials concentrate on a standardised American English accent, or on the English as spoken in certain parts of England. As we're based in Scotland, Write Back Soon will introduce learners to a Scottish accent, well known to be a particularly 'pleasing' accent to listen to! (More information and a very interesting article here!)

You can visit the website and listen to each podcast there, subscribe in iTunes, or subscribe to the rss feed in your feed aggregator.

Major updates on all our podcasts

After a few very busy weeks we've been working very hard to bring you a number of delayed items in both Coffee Break French and Coffee Break Spanish. Both CBS and CBF are now fully up to date including the bonus content for CBS 45 and CBF 06. The audio extra for CBF 07 will be published on Friday. We've also finally started the update on MDP German with notes for lessons 15-17 now available and the remaining notes will be published in the next couple of days.

Thanks to everyone for your patience over the past few weeks while we've been involved in other things. We have a few new announcements coming soon, so stay tuned!

My Daily Phrase Italian reaches 1 million downloads

We're delighted to announce today that My Daily Phrase Italian has just had its millionth download since the series began in January. We've just published our 80th programme and the series has around 4 weeks to go before it reaches its conclusion for current subscribers. Many thanks to all our listeners and we hope that users continue to find the podcast useful to pick up some basic Italian and to generate an interest in the language.

My Daily Phrase Italian now in top 10 US podcasts

We must be doing something right! I was just having a look on US iTunes and have discovered that My Daily Phrase Italian has just joined Coffee Break Spanish in the top 10 overall podcasts on US iTunes! The only other body which has more than one podcast in the top 25 is National Public Radio. And they're kinda big...! We're not - we're a very small home-run business in the west of Scotland producing regular content which seems to be going down very well out there in podland!

It's been a really busy week - we launched two podcasts last Monday: MyDailyPhrase German will hopefully follow in our Italian podcast's footsteps, and LoveLingo was just a bit of fun for St Valentine's week. I was quite pleased to see that this morning we had the number 1, 2 and 3 spot on the UK iTunes Language Courses chart (2, 5 and 6 on the Education chart). I was actually a bit disappointed to see the "Mandarin Chinese Conversation" podcast from Times Online knock us off the top spot at the beginning of the week. Not because this isn't a quality production, but because it's not exactly independent. It's basically a podcasted version of a Teach Yourself course which is available in the shops. I just wonder how much the Times paid Hodder Education to distribute the CD in the Sunday Times last week and to offer the podcast for free. I wonder if that's the way podcasting is going... will the major publishers take over?

In the meantime we'll be quite happy to see what happens with MDP Italian, MDP German and, of course, Coffee Break Spanish.

MyDailyPhrase Italian: learn Italian in 5 minutes a day!

Radio Lingua is delighted to announce the launch of a new Italian language podcast, aimed at complete beginners in Italian. The podcast will feature daily programmes each weekday for 20 weeks and each programme of four or five minutes will teach you everything you need to know for a visit to Italy. Subscribe now at the MyDailyPhrase Italian website.