Je m’appelle Max
Bonjour!
Yesterday was the first lesson at FrenchPod101.com, the latest site from Innovative Language Learning. Now a quick disclaimer: I'm currently employed by ILL so I have to like it but I really do like it. I learnt some French in high school and I'm looking forward to having it all flood back. I found our recently that 2 of my favourite comic books as a kid, Tintin and Asterix were both French language; Tintin was Belgian and Asterix French.
There is quite a lot of French out there. I heard a documentary once about people smuggling; Central Africans would make a long journey through Africa through to the Mediterranean coast, they would be smuggled into Europe by shady North African entrepreneurs. A few were lucky enough to get residency in Belgium. Interesting to the linguist in me was that at every point along the journey (from Central Africa, through to North Africa and into Belgium) French was spoken. Everyone from the empoverished Zairean wanting a better life in Europe to the shady guy who drove them through the Saharan desert to the Belgian ministry official spoke French.
Anyway, I've subscribed in iTunes. Every day a lesson will be automatically downloaded to my hard drive and transferred to my iPod. The process is quite simple:
- Open up iTunes.
- Go to "Advanced" and click on "Subscribe to Podcast".
- Enter "http://www.frenchpod101.com/feed.xml"
- Et voila! (That's French, if didn't you know!)
From now on, until I delete the entry, iTunes will check for a new French lesson daily. When there is a new lesson it will download it without being asked. This is the process that you go through every time you want to subscribe to a podcast.
But, how did I know what to enter in Step 3? Simple! FrenchPod101.com tells us so. Somewhere on the site, someone has written "Here is the RSS feed (put this in your pod catcher): http://www.frenchpod101.com/feed.xml". All one needs to do is to copy that complicated looking address after the colon and we're ready to go.
Here are some other podcasts I listen to.
- Science with Dr Karl - RSS: http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/podcast/drk_rss.xml
- Dools & Lina on TripleJ - http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/doolsandlinda/rss/podcast.xml
- From Our Own Correspondent on BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/podcasts/fooc/
- Lingua Franca on the ABC (Australian): http://abc.net.au/rn/podcast/feeds/lin.xml
- AM on the ABC Australia: http://abc.net.au/news/subscribe/amrss.xml
- KoreanClass101.com: http://www.koreanclass101.com/feed.xml
- JapanesePod101.com: http://www.japanesepod101.com/feed.xml
Most podcasts I have found after they have been recommended by other people, or I have just found on the internet. For instance, I found the BBC podcasts after just going to the BBC homepage and searching for "podcasts". If you have a look at the BBC podcast site here, you'll see all of their podcasts shows. Click on "podcast" next to the show you want, and a page displaying the address you need to enter in step 3 will appear.
I started a podcast too recently. There isn't much at the moment, but hopefully it will be brimming with fun stuff soon. Before you look around these pages for it, don't bother; you won't find it. At the time of writing, this humble blog writer hasn't found the right button to publish my podcast address yet; let me just tell you that if you want to subscribe, type http://maxiewawa.libsyn.com/rss . Let me know if you have any problems!
This is a video that goes into a little more detail. It shows some other ways you can subscribe. If you can't see it, look here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xrGpwzGmtk