EMC Publishing’s Vintage “Radio Plays” in French, German, and Spanish

[Speakeasy]

Recently, in partial response to a request for recommendations of German language audio-books having a large portion of dialogues, I suggested that the OP consider a small collection of vintage “radio play style” audio-books from EMC Publishing. It occurred to me that, while few members would be even aware of these materials, some might appreciate using them for listening practice and for expanding their vocabulary at the A1-A2 levels.

Although the target audience for these adventure stories was likely junior high school students, these audio-books still serve as entertaining language-learning devices for adults. Perhaps the most appreciable feature is that, whereas many language-learning audio-books employ only one or two voice-actors irrespective of the number of characters to be portrayed, the EMC series employed several voice-actors for each play thereby providing a more life-like listening experience whilst reducing the monotony of listening to one voice only for the duration of an entire book.

The books include a transcript of the radio plays in the target language, without translation, along with a bilingual glossary. Per the list below, there were only a few stories in the series. Anyone studying two or more of these languages could, if they so wished, work through the stories in a comparable fashion.

French
Aerodrame
Chemins Dangereux
Drôle de Mission

German
Gefährliche Wege
Geheime Mission
Mysteriöse Konzert
Die Spur fuhrt nach Bayern

Spanish
Caminos Peligrosos
El Conciertro Siniestro
Encuentro Inesperado!

I am under the impression that the books themselves are out-of-print; nevertheless, used copies can still be found on the internet. In addition, it seems that one can still order a copy directly from EMC (I do not know whether these would be clean print-on-demand copies, low quality photo-copies, or PDFs). The audio recordings are freely-available for downloading in mp3 format via the publisher’s website.

EMC Publishing
World Language Readers
http://irc.emcp.com/index.php?titleID=2684&title=World%20Language%20Readers

EDITED:
Typos, formatting, a process which has been rendered quite onerous by the fact that my “posting time” is limited to about 3 seconds.

[MorkTheFiddle]

EMC Publishing
World Language Readers
http://irc.emcp.com/index.php?titleID=2684&title=World%20Language%20Readers

This site would not open, even after I downloaded and installed Adobe Flash Player (which forced me to close my browser, thereby losing all my tabs and my logged-in connection to LLORG ).

Anyway, Speakeasy, not your fault. Thanks for posting this because the possibilities of these tapes look promising.

[Speakeasy]

Mork, I had the same problem with Chrome which refused to open the website, it is flagged as “Not secure.” I assumed that this was a problem with Kapersky (I’m your archetypical techno-peasant). However, the link works just fine with my ancient Windows Internet Explorer (you see, I am a techno-peasant).

[Elexi]

Yay!!!!! I picked up a copy of Geheime Mission today for 99 English pence - very pleased with that find.

[Deinonysus]

For Chrome, click "(i) Not secure" to the left of the URL and click "Site Settings". Change "Flash" from "Ask (default)" to "allow" and reload the page. Then it should work fine.