French Lessons from the BBC and the Peace Corps

When­ev­er traf­fic flows to to our col­lec­tion of Free Lan­guage Lessons, one good out­come is that we almost always learn of new pod­casts to add to the list. (Just as an fyi, we now have 64 indi­vid­ual pod­casts that offer instruc­tion on 22 dif­fer­ent lan­guages.)

Last week did­n’t dis­ap­point. We learned of a few good new ones. Most notably, one of our read­ers flagged for us a series of video-based French lessons assem­bled by the BBC. Pre­sent­ed by Stéphane Cor­ni­card, Ma France con­sists of 24 inter­ac­tive video units that teach you the lan­guage and a lit­tle about the coun­try. You can launch this video to get a brief intro­duc­tion. The series, which assumes a lit­tle pri­or knowl­edge of French, was shot in Lyons, the Alps and in Provence. You can access the videos on iTunes, by feed, and by web.

Anoth­er new addi­tion to col­lec­tion, How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & 37 Oth­er Lan­guages, comes from the Peace Corps. They offer some pod­casts that will teach you some French, Man­darin Chi­nese, Ara­bic, and Russ­ian. It all sounds pret­ty straight­for­ward. But then you find out that they’re teach­ing the French spo­ken in Mali (West Africa) and the Russ­ian used in Kaza­khstan — that is, the kind of places where Peace Corps vol­un­teers actu­al­ly go. It’s a bit of a dif­fer­ent twist on the usu­al lan­guage les­son pod­cast. Also, be sure to check out the instruc­tion­al PDF files that accom­pa­ny each pod­cast.