Cainntear wrote:Granrey wrote:I left the season after the season in which they started reading some simulated students letters which were learning french.
I find Podcasts usefulness is really overrated.
In most of these podcasts, you can understand the host as he uses a limited set of vocabulary with clear slow speech.
As soon as the host invites someone to the podcast, it's harder to understand the host and you rarely understand the invited person.
One day, two hosts (which I understand to 95% in their individual podcasts) that I listen got together in a podcast for an special event but I could barely understand them as their script of set of words, speed, etc gets off rail.
Yup... podcasts are hardly appropriate.
For one thing, podcasts have historically been people "playing at radio"... despite the fact that hardly anyone listens to radio talk stuff now anyway.
Some conventions they've taken on from radio:Furthermore, the entire style of radio is predicated about it being a once-a-week thing, and if you're trying to learn a language, are you really going to be listening to a single 30-minute podcast a week...? It'll take forever if you do! I remember getting a lot of LanguagePod101 things and trying to blitz through them. The jingles got increasingly irritating, because it was just a waste of time, and they weren't even quality music. Running them back to back or squeezing them in and around things, I'd hear someone ask how my week had been 3 or 4 times a day and then say they hope I have a good week and that they'll see me next week 3 or 4 times a day. It was massively infuriating.
- You get the "cold open" of trying to retain the audience attention. On radio, that means stopping people who were listening to the last programme switching off or switching over to another channel. That still happens in podcast platforms as they often start suggestions automatically after one podcast finishes, but most of the audience have actively chosen to listen to a particular podcast -- you do not need to do as much to get their attention as on radio.
- Theme tunes. The role of the theme tune is to establish a context for the listener -- tell them "this is coming on, get back in the usual headspace". Again, people have made a conscious decision to listen to podcasts, so they're likely already in the headspace.
- "Hey -- how are you doing!" type banter. A lot of the wider podcast industry has ditched this but the language ones haven't. I strongly suspect that a lot of the people doing language podcasts are a similar age to me, because it just seems all too reminiscent of the style of radio programmes that my primary school would play to me. In a primary school, it's really important to be friendly, but doing the same thing with adults is just patronising, cos it's literally treating them like children.
- 30 minute episodes... argh! The radio has timetables with fixed slots. You start on the half hour, you finish on the half hour. Nothing can be done. But a podcast can be any length you want, because there are no broadcast schedules. This means that the absolute beginners' stuff is packed with useless filler, because they don't really want to teach you more than five or ten minutes' worth of content, but they've got to make it up to 30 minutes because "that's what a podcast does". And then in the later episodes, everything's crammed in because they want to teach several important points but they don't have time to do it properly, made worse by...
- Friendly goodbye banter. Somehow, the radio convention of having to make people leave feeling good about the presenters is more important that having the learners leave feeling confident in the skills and knowledge taught. >sigh<
But the worst thing about podcasts is that the convention is to dip in and out -- you don't start on episode 1, then do episode 2 etc etc... you just start listening to the podcasts wherever and get the back episodes in a random order. You cannot teach in a structured way if you don't have a good idea of what your students know and what they don't.
I'm not sure if I've ever come across a podcast created by genuine teachers, because most would simply refuse to work that way.
I believe Cainntear was writing about instructional podcasts, e.g. xlanguagepod101, Coffee Break, etc. They can be useful for some people, I suppose, but I never liked them much. I agree with Cainntear's criticisms for the most part, especially the banter. I think the problem I had when I tried some of these podcasts was that there was too much fluff and very little substance.
On the other hand, I think general topic podcasts aimed at learners but entirely in the target language are a great stepping stone to bridge the gap between material for learners and material for natives.
Answering some of Cainntear's other criticisms (but in regard to the type of podcast I mentioned):
- Theme tunes. I think a quick bit of intro and outro music is useful for setting the stage. Good podcasts also have a short bit of music between sections, which makes the transitions less jarring. The Easy French Podcast doesn't have exit music, and I've often been surprised when it simply stops.
- "Hey -- how are you doing!" type banter. This does feature in a few of the intermediate podcasts I listen to. I love "Paris o'clock", but hate the way the host opens every single episode with "Heeeey! Salut les amis!" and then describes the purpose of the podcast in general.
- 30 minute episodes. Fortunately, none of the intermediate podcasts I listen to follow strict timings, and each episide will be as long or short as it needs to be. Some follow more regular patterns (e.g. Easy French Podcasts have a set of regular episode sections), but even they don't follow strict timings.
I'll add one complaint that really grinds my gears:
* When these podcasts have a section where they play a voice recording of some learner. Inevitably the learner speaks with an atrocious accent, and inevitably the hosts compliment them on how well they did. I listen to these podcasts to listen to good examples of the spoken language, not to hear another learner struggle to speak. InnerFrench and Easy French both do this, and it bugs me every time it happens, to the point that I don't listen to them anymore. I suspect they do this for audience building, and probably the people whose recordings they play are premium members. Fair enough, they're trying to keep paying customers happy, but it's not for me.
Back to the OPs original question, I would strongly recommend intermediate podcasts for listening practice, but not audio courses. A few years ago I made a thread listing several intermediate and advanced podcasts. By advanced, I meant podcasts aimed at natives.
https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=17152&p=193289
Some of the podcasts have closed down, e.g. Le français à la une, but episodes are still available.