Radio Lingua News Update

12/18/11 • 6 min

Welcome to this festive edition of Radio Lingua News. In this update we’ll be telling you about the fantastic milestone we reached this week, and explaining how you can save 25% on our premium memberships until the end of the year.

100 million downloads

Early on Friday morning we clocked up our 100 millionth download. Over the past five years learners from around the world have downloaded our free language lessons and we’re delighted to have reached this amazing milestone. We’d like to thank all our listeners for continuing to enjoy our language lessons, and a special thank you to all our members who help to support all of our developments.

Winter sale now on

To celebrate this milestone we’ve launched our winter sale, so you can now get 25% off our memberships and premium versions of the courses. In most cases these premium versions include lesson guides in pdf or ebook format and extra audio or video content. All the courses available on our website can be purchased at this special reduced rate by using the coupon code winter2011 at checkout. The sale will continue until midnight on New Year’s Eve – or Hogmanay as we say in Scotland, so you still have almost two weeks to take advantage of these special prices, and get a head start on your language learning for 2012.

Update on current shows

The reaction to our new show for Spanish learners, Q&A Spanish, has been fantastic. We’re delighted that lots of you are now emailing us with your questions, or leaving voicemails so that we can include your questions in the show. JP and Nahyeli are enjoying answering your questions – even the difficult ones! If you’re learning Spanish and you’ve not yet listened to Q&A Spanish, you can find out more about the show, download the episodes, and find out how to contact us to ask your question at qandaspanish.com. We’re also really pleased with On Location French, our new video blog produced by Sophie in Paris. Sophie records her regular videos with a small camera and microphone all on her own in Paris and although we had some teething problems with sound, things are settling down now. She’s been including some really interesting phrases – and this week’s expression is a fantastic construction to add to your vocabulary! You can access On Location French on iTunes, Blip.TV or of course at onlocationfrench.com. Turning to our other courses, although we’ve had a delay with our new One Minute Languages series, we’re getting back on track and there will be new episodes out this week of our Dutch, Flemish and Arabic courses. As far as Coffee Break French is concerned, we’re now into the final eight lessons of Season 3 and in these episodes we’ll be going back through the texts used in this season and picking out some of the most important grammar points, then helping learners practise these constructions with a series of translation and dictation exercises. There will be lots of extra members-only content, so with our winter sale currently on, perhaps now is the time to take advantage of our special pricing.

Happy holidays!

Finally, we’d like to wish you all a very happy holiday season and hope that you get the chance to relax, spend time with your friends and family, enjoying everything that the festive season brings, and get the chance to work on your language – or put it into practice if you happen to be travelling! Don’t forget that you can join us in our Festive Phrases video series each day of December until the 25th to learn a festive greeting in a different language. Use the link on the home page of the Radio Lingua site to open each day of our linguistic Advent Calendar. Until the next time, happy holidays from everyone here at Radio Lingua!

100 million downloads

Winter sale now on

Update on current shows

Happy holidays!

Previous Episode

Radio Lingua is 5 years old – and we’re celebrating!

It’s five years since we launched the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish, and since then we’ve served up millions of language lessons to learners around the world through our podcasts, our enhanced lessons and our ebooks. We’re delighted today to announce five new courses, and we’ll also be letting you know about a few exciting projects which are due to be launched early in 2012.

Spanish

¡Empecemos con el español! On the 18th October 2006 we began with Spanish, and we’re doing the same today. Today we’re delighted to launch a brand new Spanish show. When you’re learning a language on your own, or if you don’t have access to a teacher or a native speaker, it’s difficult to get the answers you need to help you make progress. We receive questions almost every day from learners through posts on the website, emails, voicemails, tweets and Facebook, and we decided that the best way to deal with all of these questions would be to launch Q&A Spanish: you ask the questions and we provide the answers. Q&A Spanish will be hosted by teacher and languages expert JP Villanueva and native Spanish speaker Nahyeli Mendivil, so you have the best of both worlds! Each week they’ll help you develop your confidence in Spanish further by providing tips and examples of Spanish vocabulary, usage and grammar. Q&A Spanish starts today, so you can already subscribe to the podcast. Click here to find out more about how you can take part in the show.

French

We’re also delighted to be announcing a brand new French video show. In On Location French you can join Sophie who is a UK student currently studying in Paris. She’s there for a year and she’s agreed to be our “correspondent”, bringing us weekly reports on interesting expressions she learns as she interacts with native speakers every day. Sophie will also be providing some cultural input as she gets to know the city, and we’re really looking forward to finding out more about her experiences in Paris in her weekly videoblog. Find out more and watch the episodes at the On Location French page.

Dutch, Flemish and Arabic

We’re delighted to be launching three new courses in our ever-popular One Minute Languages series. One of the most requested languages over the past few years has been Dutch, and we’ve decided to produce a Dutch and Flemish version of the course. Both languages are very similar – Flemish is the variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium, and of course Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and in other countries around the world such as Suriname and Aruba. One Minute Dutch launches on Thursday 20th October and One Minute Flemish will be published on Fridays from 21st October. We’ve also been asked many times to produce an Arabic version of our One Minute Languages course. One Minute Arabic will run for ten weeks from tomorrow, Wednesday 19th October. We’re concentrating on Modern Standard Arabic which will ensure that as a learner you’ll be understood across the Arab world, from Casablanca to Kuwait. With these latest additions to the One Minute Languages series, we now cover 26 languages, from Arabic to Zulu making Radio Lingua your first stop for language-learning on the go, literally from A to Z!

What’s coming down the line?

There may be some of you who are looking forward to a third season of Coffee Break Spanish. We’re working on this at the moment and by the time the reruns of Show Time Spanish end in January we should be ready to go with Coffee Break Spanish Season 3. French learners will be very pleased to know that Pierre-Benoît has been wandering about in the streets of Paris again and a second series of Walk, Talk and Learn French is in production. We’re also very excited about the January launch of our new children’s French video course, High Five French. We’ll be releasing more information about all of these projects over the next few months, so stay tuned!

And finally...

Finally, a personal note. Five years ago today, as I uploaded the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish to the internet I had no idea how things would develop. At the time it was really just a personal project – something to keep me involved in Spanish as my “day job” had changed and I was no longer as closely involved in languages. Since then we’ve seen Radio Lingua grow into a successful company, delivering language lessons to millions of learners from all corners of the globe. I’d like to say a personal thank you to all of the brilliant people involved in the production of our courses, and to everyone involved in the day-to-da...

Next Episode

Radio Lingua News – Launch Video

Radio Lingua Founder and CEO introduces the Coffee Break Spanish Magazine, Coffee Break French and Spanish iBooks, our new On Location Languages blog series, changes and improvements to the website and a new Coffee Break language in this special launch video.