In lesson 37 Mark is in the hotel reception asking for directions to a local shopping centre. The conversation will help you practise the language required in this situation.

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This weekend (Friday 30th October – Sunday 1st November) the Radio Lingua team will be at the Language Show in London’s Olympia. We’ll be talking to language learners, answering questions, and offering visitors the chance to win a new iPod nano (the cool one with the video camera!) pre-loaded with a premium language course of your choice. There are free tickets available for the show from the official website and we’ll be among hundreds of companies and organisations involved in language learning who will be exhibiting.

Come along and chat with Mark from Coffee Break Spanish/French and Pierre-Benoît from Walk, Talk and Learn French. If you’re a teacher you can find out more about our education workshops and products through Radio Lingua Schools, and take advantage of our show offers (40% off any subscription when bought at the show). We’ll be tweeting from the show about interesting language-learners we meet, so make sure you’re following @radiolingua on Twitter if you can’t attend.

We’re at stand 33, to the left as you enter the main entrance. If you’re planning to come and say “bonjour”, “hola” or whatever other language you’ve been learning with us, do let us know by posting a comment below, and we’ll look out for you. There may even be an exclusive Radio Lingua free gift for you!

This week’s Coffee Break French deals with hiring a car in a French-speaking area. Like our last episode, this lesson focuses on using the language we’ve been working on recently in a practical context.

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This week Mark returns with Loreto for the second of our Chilean episodes of Show Time Spanish. In episode 37 we learn a  bit more about Chilean culture and Loreto teaches Mark some Chilean expressions.

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On 18th October 2006, episode one of a new language-learning podcast called Coffee Break Spanish was released to the world. This show was a bit different from the other Spanish learning shows out there: it was a gradual introduction to basic Spanish presented by teacher Mark, teaching student Kara. At this stage no-one really knew if the idea would work, but Coffee Break Spanish grew to become one of the most popular ways to learn Spanish online. The show quickly climbed the charts on iTunes UK and US, and began to feature in the top podcasts at Podcast Alley and on Libsyn.

Three years down the line and the Radio Lingua Network now produces twenty-seven language courses in eighteen languages and this week saw the sixty millionth download of our language lessons! That means – on average – around 55,000 downloads per day, every day for the last three years.

It’s time to celebrate!

To celebrate this milestone in our company’s development, we’re reducing everything to 60% of the normal prices, ie. 40% off, for one week only, from noon GMT on 18th October through to midnight GMT on 25th October. There has never been a better time to purchase our lesson guides, enhanced podcasts and extra listening materials. Simply use coupon code sixty when you sign up for any of our shows. You can choose between Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French and Show Time Spanish, or indeed one of our shorter One Minute or TwitterLearn courses. By purchasing a membership you can access a range of materials including pdf lesson guides featuring the words and phrases included in each lesson, enhanced podcasts which are perfect for listening on the iPod Touch or iPhone where you can see the flashcards synchronised to the audio, and bonus listening materials to help you improve your language skills even more.

Please note that the coupon code can’t be used in conjunction with any other offer and is limited to one purchase per member. Please note too that in order to qualify for the discount, the coupon code must be used at checkout time. We can’t offer retrospective discounts if the coupon code was not used.

Announcing a new development

We’ve been reading your comments regarding discussion boards and building a community around our lessons. Our previous discussion boards were created before we developed our membership system, so were unfortunately not linked to the system. Today we’re launching our new Community area where listeners can interact with each other, share their language-learning experiences and benefit from collaborative learning with fellow listeners. Accessing the Community is free, but you’ll need to sign up for an account in our system, so we’ll hopefully avoid the spam problems we’ve had in the past.

If you’re already a member of our system then you’ll be able to access My Courses in the community, where we’ll lead activities and generate discussions in which you can practise what you’ve learned in each lesson. My Courses is restricted to our premium members, so if you’ve purchased a Season Pass to Coffee Break French Level 2, you’ll see this course in My Courses, allowing you to interact with your fellow learners in the activities and discussions there. And if you’re not yet a premium member, you can join this week at a hugely discounted price! We’re looking forward to interacting with all our learners in My Courses.

Any questions? Get in touch with us, or post your question in our Community area.

Here’s to many more years of language learning with Radio Lingua!

Over the past five weeks things haven’t been going too smoothly here at Radio Lingua, but we’re getting back to business now. I thought it would be useful to explain to  our listeners what’s been happening.

Recently we’ve been experiencing a huge number of problems with our server. It appears that the traffic to our site and our podcasts has been growing significantly, which is fantastic. However, it meant that fairly suddenly we outgrew our existing server and needed to rework things quite a bit. As you probably know, we’re a very small company with just three core members of staff and we don’t have a technical department ready to tackle any small – or bigger – issues which crop up. We tend to do everything in house which of course means that if we’re tackling technical problems then the ongoing teaching and production will inevitably suffer.

However, this time round the problems were just too great and we’ve been working with some very helpful technical wizards and over the past two weeks we’ve been preparing all our content for a huge migration over to a new server. With hundreds of lessons in many languages, and several parts of our site all spread across different servers, it has been quite a job bringing everything together and putting it back together again on our new server. The final stage of the migration began yesterday and by the time you read this we should be fully migrated.

In this changeover time we’ve missed a few comments and some users have had problems accessing materials. We are confident that these problems have been resolved and that all users should now be able to access the materials associated with their free or paid subscriptions.

What’s changed?

For users there shouldn’t really be anything visible that has changed, other than the fact that all our sites (with the exception of our Helpdesk at radiolinguahelpdesk.com) will now be accessed at radiolingua.com, instead of being shared across radiolingua.com, rlnvault.com and radiolinguamedia.com. To make sure you’re on the right site, simply check your browser bar which should read http://radiolingua.com/… Members’ materials should also be accessed via radiolingua.com.

One other point which is worth mentioning is that where we’ve updated our premium content you’ll notice that the podcast names in iTunes have changed from “RLN Coffee Break French…” (or equivalent) to “RLN * Coffee Break French”, ie. with an asterisk after RLN. This will only be the case for active feeds, those which are being actively updated, ie. Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French and Show Time Spanish.

Anything else?

Well, since you ask, yes! But you’ll have to wait until Sunday 18th October to find out what! Sunday is a bit of a special day, and we’ll explain everything then.

Finally, on behalf of our small team, I’d like to thank all our listeners and premium subscribers for your patience and understanding both in the past few weeks and in the coming days as we work through any possible teething troubles with our new setup. We hope that the new server and a more robust, integrated site setup will make it easier to access our materials and learn more languages.

Mark Pentleton
Radio Lingua Director

After a few weeks of server problems, we’re back with another episode of Coffee Break Spanish recorded in Santiago de la Ribera in eastern Spain. This week Mark and Kara go shopping for postcards and shoes.

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¡Estamos de vuelta! It’s been a few weeks since our last episode of Show Time Spanish, and this has been the result of major server problems. We’ve completed a migration of all our content to new servers today, and we’re delighted to be back with a new episode of Show Time Spanish in which Mark is joined by Loreto, from Chile. In this first of two episodes with Loreto, we learn about the geography and culture of Chile.

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Coffee Break French is back! In Lesson 68 it’s time to put the language we’ve been learning into practice and return to some transactional situations, this time equipped with a thorough understanding of how the language works. In this week’s show Mark and Anna discuss travelling by taxi in French, and use the constructions and expressions learned in recent weeks within this context.

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In this week’s show we’re returning to our telenovela, Verano Español. It’s the morning after the night before when Ángel arrived drunk at Iona’s party. Needless to say Laura’s dad isn’t very impressed with Ángel! Laura’s friend Fiona arrives from Scotland and the love triangle threatens to become a square! As usual, in Act II, Mark will help listeners understand the story by working through a series of questions and answers about what happens in this episode.

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In lesson 35, Mark and Kara are at the tourist information office asking about what there is to do in Santiago de la Ribera.

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In Lesson 67 we’re building on the verbal constructions we’ve been learning over the past few weeks and introducing the phrase après avoir fait quelque chose. This lesson also explains what happens when an être verb is used with this construction.

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