20 Audio Lessons That Will Teach You Spanish, French, Italian and German

in Most Popular | April 20th, 2007

As we’ll men­tion in an upcom­ing piece, Euro­pean lan­guages dom­i­nate the list of most pop­u­lar edu­ca­tion­al pod­casts. So we thought that we’d high­light the key pod­casts that will teach you the major Euro­pean lan­guages — Span­ish, French, Ital­ian and Ger­man. Mean­while, if you want to learn Eng­lish online, please see our piece below. Bonne chance.

For our com­plete col­lec­tion, see How to Learn Lan­guages for Free: Span­ish, Eng­lish, Chi­nese & Beyond.

French

  • French for Begin­ners iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Fun, effec­tive lessons for begin­ners. Pro­vid­ed by the French Ecole.
  • Le Jour­nal en français facile iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Night­ly news from RFI pre­sent­ed in slow­ly spo­ken French to assist you with your com­pre­hen­sion.
  • Learn French by Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
    • A well-reviewed series of lessons for begin­ners and those who want to brush up on their French.
  • Learn French with Dai­ly Pod­casts iTunes Feed Web Site
    • These lessons are brought to you by French teach­ers from Paris. They are best suit­ed for those who already have some begin­ning French under their belts.
  • The French Pod Class iTunes Feed Web Site
    • A very pop­u­lar col­lec­tion that teach­es stu­dents the French lan­guage and dif­fer­ent facets of French cul­ture.
  • The Ver­b­cast — French Verbs by Relax­ation iTunes Feed Web Site
    • A four-week series of lessons that will allow you to refine your knowl­edge of French verbs.

Ger­man

  • Deutsch — warum nicht?
  • Slow­ly Spo­ken News iTunes Feed
    • Deutsche Welle pro­vides a night­ly news broad­cast in Ger­man that’s spo­ken slow­ly so that you can work on your com­pre­hen­sion.
  • GerG­er­man­Gram­mar iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Ger­man gram­mar lessons aimed at Amer­i­can stu­dents.
  • Ler­nen Wir Deutsch iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Pre­sent­ed in video, these “vod­casts” get high marks for being not only edu­ca­tion­al but also very enter­tain­ing.
  • MyDailyPhrase.com iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Learn Ger­man phrase by phrase over a course of 20 weeks. The pod­casts will cov­er all the lan­guage you need to know to get by on a vis­it to a Ger­man-speak­ing coun­try. This series is put togeth­er by the same peo­ple cre­at­ed the pop­u­lar series “Cof­fee Break Span­ish.”

Ital­ian

  • LearnItalianPod.com iTunes Feed Web Site
    • A series of Ital­ian lan­guage lessons that will get you up and run­ning. I have per­son­al­ly used them and found them effec­tive.
  • Let’s Speak Ital­ian iTunes Feed Web Site
    • This col­lec­tion will help you learn Ital­ian in small, man­age­able 5‑minute bites.
  • MyDailyPhrase.com iTunes Web Site
    • Learn Ital­ian step by step over a course of 20 weeks. The pod­casts will cov­er all the lan­guage you need to know to get by on a vis­it to a Ital­ian-speak­ing coun­try. Cre­at­ed by the same peo­ple who put togeth­er the pop­u­lar series “Cof­fee Break Span­ish.”
  • World Lan­guages Pod­cast­ing — Ital­ian Pod­cast iTunes Feed Web Site
    • It’s admit­ted­ly a bit of an untra­di­tion­al way to learn Ital­ian. This pod­cast lets you lis­ten to con­ver­sa­tions about Aus­tralian cul­ture in Ital­ian.

Span­ish

  • Cof­fee Break Span­ish iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Learn Span­ish in a low-key, effec­tive way. Cur­rent­ly the #2 over­all favorite in iTunes’ pod­cast col­lec­tion. They must be loaded on iPods every­where.
  • Final­ly Learn Span­ish — Beyond the Basics iTunes Feed Web Site
    • If you’ve had some Span­ish class­es and you need expe­ri­ence lis­ten­ing to and speak­ing the lan­guage, then Final­ly Learn Span­ish has a col­lec­tion of pod­casts for you.
  • Insta Span­ish Lessons iTunes Feed Web Site
    • Week­ly com­pre­hen­sion and gram­mar exer­cis­es for stu­dents of all lev­els. One of the more pop­u­lar pod­casts on iTunes.
  • Learn Span­ish Sur­vival Guide iTunes Feed
    • If you’re plan­ning a trip to a Span­ish speak­ing coun­try, and if you don’t know the lan­gu­gage, this will help get you up to speed.

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25 UC Berkeley Courses Available via Free Video

in Most Popular, Online Courses, UC Berkeley | March 10th, 2007

Not long ago, we wrote a pop­u­lar piece about UC-Berke­ley’s iTunes ini­tia­tive which, to sum it up,allows any­one, any­where, to down­load com­plete uni­ver­si­ty cours­es to their iPods for free. Amaz­ing. Today, we want to point out that Berke­ley also makes avail­able full-fledged cours­es via video/webcast. You can find the com­plete list of cours­es here, but below we have list­ed below 25 cours­es that fig­ure into a “core” under­grad­u­ate cur­ricu­lum. In short, this list includes many good nuts and bolts cours­es, which will teach you a lot and, even bet­ter, cost you noth­ing. Each of these cours­es, com­ing straight from the class­room, can be accessed with Real Play­er, and some can also be accessed as MP3s.

On a relat­ed note, our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and our col­lec­tion of Free Cours­es will give you access to many more uni­ver­si­ty lec­tures and cours­es, so be sure to give them a look. You may also want to check out our “playlist” of intel­li­gent videos on YouTube as well as our recent piece: 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube.

UC Berke­ley Cours­es:

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The War of the Worlds on Podcast: How H.G. Wells and Orson Welles Riveted A Nation

in Books, Literature, Media, Most Popular | February 8th, 2007

Today, by pop­u­lar demand, we’re run­ning an updat­ed ver­sion of one of our more pop­u­lar posts to date. Enjoy…

At has­tened speeds dur­ing the past year, we have seen book lovers record­ing home­grown audio­books and post­ing them on sites like Lib­rivox (see our col­lec­tion of free audio­books here). For obvi­ous copy­right rea­sons, these audio texts large­ly come from the pub­lic domain, and, yes, they’re some­times of uneven qual­i­ty. Some good, some okay. Among the recent releas­es, you’d expect to find great clas­si­cal works — the major plays by Shake­speare, the essen­tial trea­tis­es by Pla­to and oth­er philoso­phers, etc. — and you do get some of those. How­ev­er, far more often you get texts by more mod­ern writ­ers who wrote with­in the thriller, sci fi and adven­ture gen­res. Here, I’m talk­ing about Wash­ing­ton Irv­ing, Robert Louis Steven­son, Edgar Allen Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H.G. Wells. (Find these pod­casts here.)

It seems rather fit­ting that Wells, the father of sci­ence fic­tion, would be among the first to have his writ­ings dig­i­tal­ly record­ed and dis­trib­uted. Nowa­days, you can down­load, sync and lis­ten to his major works – The New Accel­er­a­tor (mp3), The Invis­i­ble Man (iTunes — feed), The Time Machine (iTunes — feed), and The War of the Worlds (iTunes). But what’s bet­ter than all of this, at least in our minds, is this vin­tage gem …

Here you can down­load the ver­sion of The War of the Worlds that Orson Welles famous­ly adapt­ed and aired on nation­al radio in Octo­ber 1938. Pre­sent­ed so that it sound­ed like an actu­al news broad­cast, the Orson Welles ver­sion was mis­tak­en for truth by many lis­ten­ers who caught the pro­gram mid­stream (more info here), and, soon enough, they found them­selves flee­ing an unfold­ing Mar­t­ian inva­sion, run­ning down into their base­ments with guns cocked and ready to fire. You can catch the mp3 ver­sion of the famous Welles record­ing here (and also alter­na­tive­ly here). Have fun with this broad­cast. It’s a clas­sic.

Relat­ed con­tent: For more old time, sci-fi radio broad­casts, check out this nice col­lec­tion on iTunes.

Also see: Vin­tage Radio Archive: The Lone Ranger, Abbott & Costel­lo, and Bob Hope

Sub­scribe to Our Feed and peruse our col­lec­tion of Free Audio­book Pod­casts

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45 Free Cutting-Edge Books … Courtesy of Creative Commons

in Books, e-books, Most Popular | January 30th, 2007

Yes­ter­day, we alert­ed you to the free audio and text ver­sions of Lawrence’s Lessig’s book, Free Cul­ture: How Big Media Uses Tech­nol­o­gy and the Law to Lock Down Cul­ture and Con­trol Cre­ativ­i­ty. Today, we’re point­ing you to a larg­er col­lec­tion of high-qual­i­ty books (45 in total) that you can down­load legal­ly thanks to Lessig’s Cre­ative Com­mons. The trove includes a good mix of gen­res. In fic­tion, you’ll find three works by sci-fi writer and blog­ger Cory Doc­torow — East­ern Stan­dard Tribe, Some­one Comes To Town, Some­one Leaves Town and Down and Out in the Mag­ic King­dom. Under non-fic­tion, you can freely access Gamer The­o­ry by McKen­zie Wark (Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Press), Democ­ra­tiz­ing Inno­va­tion by Eric von Hip­pel (MIT Press), Yochai Ben­kler’s The Wealth of Net­works (Yale Uni­ver­si­ty Press), and Dan Gilmor’s We the Media: Grass­roots Jour­nal­ism by the Peo­ple, For the Peo­ple. Final­ly, on the “how-to” side of things, you’ll stum­ble upon titles along the lines of 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google. Not a bad col­lec­tion of works, and cer­tain­ly worth the price.

Most of these books are issued in tra­di­tion­al print ($$$) and free down­load ver­sions, which rais­es the obvi­ous ques­tion: does this make any busi­ness sense for pub­lish­ers, let alone authors? Lawrence Lessig, who ini­ti­at­ed the con­cept, asserts that it does, not­ing that more read­ers who access the free down­load copy will ulti­mate­ly buy the print ver­sion than those who don’t. Or, put more sim­ply: the con­verts will exceed can­ni­bals, which results in a win-win-win-win sit­u­a­tion. The read­ers win one way or anoth­er; the authors and pub­lish­ers win; soci­ety wins; and so does the free flow of infor­ma­tion. What more can you want?

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Digital MBA: America’s Best Business Schools on Your iPod

in Business, Economics, Most Popular | January 29th, 2007

WhartonIs it some­thing of an odd­i­ty to see the words of famous philoso­phers and his­to­ri­ans get­ting dig­i­tized

and down­loaded to iPods every­where? Sure it is, and that’s why we gen­er­al­ly like talk­ing about human­i­ties pod­casts. But is it strange to think of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing busi­ness schools carv­ing out a space on iTunes and bring­ing their ideas to an inter­na­tion­al audi­ence? Hard­ly. For schools whose suc­cess depends on being close­ly tied to the pulse of Amer­i­can and glob­al audi­ences, get­ting involved with pod­cast­ing is a no brain­er.

Let’s take a brief tour of what Amer­i­ca’s top b‑schools are up to these days, start­ing with The Whar­ton School of The Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia. Launched about a year ago, this pod­cast col­lec­tion (iTunes — Feed — Web Site) is an off­shoot of the school’s online busi­ness jour­nal called “Knowledge@Wharton.” And what you get here are “audio arti­cles” that fea­ture high-pro­file exec­u­tives and fac­ul­ty, includ­ing sev­er­al that high­light stock mar­ket guru Jere­my Siegel. Some of these pod­casts focus on time­less b‑school issues (strat­e­gy, inno­va­tion, merg­ers, alliances, etc.). Oth­ers explore more time­ly ques­tions: New Mod­els for TV and Inter­net, What Makes an Online Com­mu­ni­ty Tick?, and Which New Tech Com­pa­nies Are Inno­vat­ing Most?. Most are worth your time.

From Philadel­phia, we move to Har­vard in Cam­bridge. This pod­cast col­lec­tion, known as HBR Idea­Cast (iTunes  Feed), is also close­ly aligned with the school’s busi­ness jour­nal, the famed Har­vard Busi­ness Review. And, here again, you get well-pro­duced audio seg­ments that offer insights on key issues in today’s busi­ness world, whether it’s how to do busi­ness in Chi­na, how to be an effec­tive and resilient leader, or how to adapt to very new trends in e‑commerce.

Mov­ing south to the Research Tri­an­gle, we vis­it Duke’s Fuqua School of Busi­ness (iTunes — Web Site), which has the begin­nings of what promis­es to be a strong audio col­lec­tion. While you’ll want to give the most time to the fair­ly robust Dis­tin­guished Speak­er Series, you may want to peruse the MBA Lead­er­ship and Mar­ket­ing Expe­ri­ence series as well. Also in the same gen­er­al vicin­i­ty is anoth­er col­lec­tion worth a good look. It’s from the Dar­d­en School of Busi­ness at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vir­ginia (iTunes — Feed — Web Site)

By now, you prob­a­bly have a good sense of what you can gen­er­al­ly expect to find in these col­lec­tions. So let’s briefly leave you with two last ones. First, the com­pi­la­tion assem­bled by The Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go Grad­u­ate School of Busi­ness (iTunes  Feed  Web Site). Among oth­ers, you’ll encounter talks by Nobel Prize win­ner Gary Beck­er and also Steven Levitt, the co-author of the recent best­seller Freako­nom­ics. Last­ly, we end at Stan­ford and its series called “Entre­pre­neur­ial Thought Lead­ers,” which gives you access to what Sil­i­con Val­ley has in no short sup­ply — entre­pre­neurs, includ­ing ones from Google, Genen­tech, and Juniper Net­works. Click. Down­load. Sync. And you’ll be in busi­ness.

For more pod­casts, see our uni­ver­si­ty pod­cast col­lec­tion and also our  com­plete pod­cast col­lec­tion here.

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10 Excellent University Podcasts

in Most Popular | January 19th, 2007


For more enrich­ing audio, see our col­lec­tion of Free Uni­ver­si­ty Cours­es.

1.) Abra­ham Lin­col­n’s Inven­tion of Pres­i­den­tial Pow­ers — James MacPher­son iTunes Audio Stream

Prince­ton’s James MacPher­son, a Pulitzer Prize-win­ning author on the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, dis­cuss­es how Lin­coln invent­ed pres­i­den­tial war-time pow­ers. It’s a top­ic of par­tic­u­lar inter­est giv­en the recent debate over the
valid­i­ty of war­rant­less wire­taps.

2.) Active Lib­er­ty: A Con­ver­sa­tion with Supreme Court Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er iTunes Audio Stream
Jus­tice Stephen Brey­er makes the case that lib­er­ty, as defined by the con­sti­tu­tion, isn’t about free­dom from gov­ern­ment inter­fer­ence (neg­a­tive lib­er­ty), as so many want to pro­claim today, but about the free­dom to par­tic­i­pate in our demo­c­ra­t­ic sys­tem (active lib­er­ty).

3.) Democ­ra­cy Mat­ters — Cor­nell West iTunes Audio Stream
A pow­er­ful ora­tor, West looks at how democ­ra­cies dete­ri­o­rate when cit­i­zens lose their abil­i­ty to think crit­i­cal­ly and rec­og­nize the deep under­ly­ing prob­lems that exist with­in their own nations. (The talk real­ly gets start­ed about 10 min­utes in.)

4.) Exis­ten­tial­ism in Lit­er­a­ture & Film — Hubert Drey­fus iTunes
This is not a lec­ture, but rather a full-fledged course taught by UC Berke­ley’s Hubert Drey­fus, which takes a close look at how exis­ten­tial­ism suf­fus­es impor­tant lit­er­a­ture, phi­los­o­phy and films — Dos­to­evsky’s Broth­ers Kara­ma­zov, Niet­zsche’s Gay Sci­ence, and Alain Resnais’ film Hiroshi­ma Mon Amour.

5.) Grad­u­a­tion Speech — Steve Jobs iTunes audio iTunes video Google Video
A short speech by Apple’s vision­ary CEO where he talks about his phi­los­o­phy on life. The moti­vat­ing talk was giv­en at Stan­ford in June
2005.

6.) Nation Build­ing: Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan — Fran­cis Fukuya­ma iTunes Audio Stream
Fukuya­ma, who once saw the world com­ing into an eter­nal demo­c­ra­t­ic bal­ance, now talks more sober­ly about how to han­dle the dif­fi­cult task of re-build­ing nations in gen­er­al, and par­tic­u­lar­ly those in the tur­bu­lent Mid­dle East. Fukuya­ma teach­es at Johns Hop­kins and heads the SAIS Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment Pro­gram.

7.) The Art of Read­ing a Poem — Harold Bloom iTunes — Audio Stream
The famed lit­er­ary crit­ic takes his stu­dents through a poem by Wal­lace Stevens, Parts of a World, and con­stant­ly moves between inter­pre­ta­tion and digres­sion — digres­sions that are often filled with intrigu­ing per­son­al anec­dotes.
The record­ing is not high­ly edit­ed, which lets you feel like a fly on the wall in the class­room. (Bloom real­ly gets start­ed about 13 min­utes in.)

8.) The Heart of Non Vio­lence — His Holi­ness the Dalai Lama iTunes Video (Real Play­er)
The Dalai Lama, the polit­i­cal and reli­gious leader of Tibet and win­ner of the Nobel Peace Price, speaks at Stan­ford about non­vi­o­lence, what it
means, when vio­lence is jus­ti­fi­able, and whether US mil­i­tary actions in Iraq might actu­al­ly be jus­ti­fied.

9.) The Future of the Inter­net — Tim Bern­ers-Lee iTunes Audio Stream
Tim Bern­ers-Lee, founder of the world wide web and direc­tor of the World Wide Web Con­sor­tium, speaks at Prince­ton about the seman­tic web and the chal­lenges to its future devel­op­ment.

10.) The Life and Work of Philip John­son — Vin­cent Scul­ly iTunes
Vin­cent Scul­ly, one of Amer­i­ca’s finest archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ri­ans, takes a look at the life and career of Philip John­son, one of Amer­i­ca’s finest archi­tects.

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Free Beethoven and Mozart Recordings via Podcast

in Most Popular, Music | January 4th, 2007

Beethoven_1See our fol­low up piece: More Free Clas­si­cal Music Pod­casts: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Wag­n­er and Some Yo-Yo Ma

Cour­tesy of Deutsche Welle, the Ger­man inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­ing ser­vice, you can fill your iPod at no cost with some excep­tion­al clas­si­cal music. We’d par­tic­u­lar­ly encour­age you to focus on two pod­casts. First, Beethoven­fest (iTunes Feed Web Site), which lets users down­load “Beethoven’s most famous sym­phonies per­formed by excel­lent young orches­tras.” Next, Clas­si­cal Mas­ter­pieces (iTunes Feed Web Site), which gives you free access to sym­phonies by Mozart, Strauss, Schu­mann, Brahms, and Bruck­n­er, each pre­sent­ed by con­duc­tor Kent Nagano and the inter­na­tion­al­ly known DSO Berlin. (Inci­den­tal­ly, a quite large col­lec­tion of free clas­si­cal music can also be found on Wikipedia. Thanks to one of our read­ers for let­ting us know.)

Final­ly, we should men­tion that Deutsche Welle offers a lot of oth­er free pod­casts in Eng­lish. Take for exam­ple Inspired Minds (iTunes Feed Web Site), a series of pod­casts explor­ing the world’s great thinkers, or Deutsche Warum Nicht? (iTunes), a mul­ti-part series that will teach you Ger­man from the ground up. A great trove of con­tent that’s worth your time.

You can find more clas­si­cal music in our Music Pod­cast Col­lec­tion .

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The Hottest Course on iTunes (and the Future of Digital Education)

in Apple, History, Most Popular | December 19th, 2006

What’s the most pop­u­lar pod­cast in the High­er Edu­ca­tion sec­tion of iTunes? Ahead of all the pod­casts from Prince­ton, and all of those from Yale, and ahead of the Under­stand­ing Com­put­ers course from Har­vard, and even the psy­chol­o­gy course from UC Berke­ley, is an unex­pect­ed pod­cast called Twelve Byzan­tine Rulers: The His­to­ry of the Byzan­tine Empire. The course, which focus­es on the Greek-speak­ing Roman Empire of the Mid­dle Ages, is taught by Lars Brown­worth, who teach­es high school at The Stony Brook School on Long Island, New York. And it gets rave reviews. “I’m dis­ap­point­ed because I don’t think I’ll ever find a pod­cast that I enjoy as much as this one.” “This pod­cast has quick­ly become a hit with me and all of my friends, even those who don’t like his­to­ry so much.” You get the gist.

The suc­cess of this course makes us think that com­pa­nies that sell dig­i­tal lec­tures for a fee might not be long for this world. Take The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny for exam­ple. They’re in the busi­ness of sell­ing pol­ished, lec­ture-based cours­es, which can often be very well done. And, yes, they offer too a course on the Byzan­tine Empire that retails in audio down­load form for $129. So what will the savvy con­sumer do? Down­load Brown­worth’s course for free? Or pay $129? This is not a knock on what The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny is doing. I like their prod­uct and can appre­ci­ate their need to sell prod­ucts to recoup their costs. But you can’t com­pete with free. With so many uni­ver­si­ty cours­es now tap­ing their cours­es and allow­ing peo­ple to down­load them to the ubiq­ui­tous iPod (see our full list of uni­ver­si­ty pod­casts), you have to won­der whether The Teach­ing Com­pa­ny is just anoth­er once viable busi­ness mod­el that is being steadi­ly com­mod­itzed by the Inter­net.

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