Welcome to this festive edition of Radio Lingua News. In this update we’ll be telling you about the fantastic milestone we reached this week, and explaining how you can save 25% on our premium memberships until the end of the year.

100 million downloads

Early on Friday morning we clocked up our 100 millionth download. Over the past five years learners from around the world have downloaded our free language lessons and we’re delighted to have reached this amazing milestone. We’d like to thank all our listeners for continuing to enjoy our language lessons, and a special thank you to all our members who help to support all of our developments.

Winter sale now on

To celebrate this milestone we’ve launched our winter sale, so you can now get 25% off our memberships and premium versions of the courses. In most cases these premium versions include lesson guides in pdf or ebook format and extra audio or video content. All the courses available on our website can be purchased at this special reduced rate by using the coupon code winter2011 at checkout. The sale will continue until midnight on New Year’s Eve – or Hogmanay as we say in Scotland, so you still have almost two weeks to take advantage of these special prices, and get a head start on your language learning for 2012.

Update on current shows

The reaction to our new show for Spanish learners, Q&A Spanish, has been fantastic. We’re delighted that lots of you are now emailing us with your questions, or leaving voicemails so that we can include your questions in the show. JP and Nahyeli are enjoying answering your questions – even the difficult ones! If you’re learning Spanish and you’ve not yet listened to Q&A Spanish, you can find out more about the show, download the episodes, and find out how to contact us to ask your question at qandaspanish.com. We’re also really pleased with On Location French, our new video blog produced by Sophie in Paris. Sophie records her regular videos with a small camera and microphone all on her own in Paris and although we had some teething problems with sound, things are settling down now. She’s been including some really interesting phrases – and this week’s expression is a fantastic construction to add to your vocabulary! You can access On Location French on iTunes, Blip.TV or of course at onlocationfrench.com. Turning to our other courses, although we’ve had a delay with our new One Minute Languages series, we’re getting back on track and there will be new episodes out this week of our Dutch, Flemish and Arabic courses. As far as Coffee Break French is concerned, we’re now into the final eight lessons of Season 3 and in these episodes we’ll be going back through the texts used in this season and picking out some of the most important grammar points, then helping learners practise these constructions with a series of translation and dictation exercises. There will be lots of extra members-only content, so with our winter sale currently on, perhaps now is the time to take advantage of our special pricing.

Happy holidays!

Finally, we’d like to wish you all a very happy holiday season and hope that you get the chance to relax, spend time with your friends and family, enjoying everything that the festive season brings, and get the chance to work on your language – or put it into practice if you happen to be travelling! Don’t forget that you can join us in our Festive Phrases video series each day of December until the 25th to learn a festive greeting in a different language. Use the link on the home page of the Radio Lingua site to open each day of our linguistic Advent Calendar. Until the next time, happy holidays from everyone here at Radio Lingua!

It’s five years since we launched the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish, and since then we’ve served up millions of language lessons to learners around the world through our podcasts, our enhanced lessons and our ebooks. We’re delighted today to announce five new courses, and we’ll also be letting you know about a few exciting projects which are due to be launched early in 2012.

Spanish

¡Empecemos con el español! On the 18th October 2006 we began with Spanish, and we’re doing the same today. Today we’re delighted to launch a brand new Spanish show. When you’re learning a language on your own, or if you don’t have access to a teacher or a native speaker, it’s difficult to get the answers you need to help you make progress. We receive questions almost every day from learners through posts on the website, emails, voicemails, tweets and Facebook, and we decided that the best way to deal with all of these questions would be to launch Q&A Spanish: you ask the questions and we provide the answers. Q&A Spanish will be hosted by teacher and languages expert JP Villanueva and native Spanish speaker Nahyeli Mendivil, so you have the best of both worlds! Each week they’ll help you develop your confidence in Spanish further by providing tips and examples of Spanish vocabulary, usage and grammar. Q&A Spanish starts today, so you can already subscribe to the podcast. Click here to find out more about how you can take part in the show.

French

We’re also delighted to be announcing a brand new French video show. In On Location French you can join Sophie who is a UK student currently studying in Paris. She’s there for a year and she’s agreed to be our “correspondent”, bringing us weekly reports on interesting expressions she learns as she interacts with native speakers every day. Sophie will also be providing some cultural input as she gets to know the city, and we’re really looking forward to finding out more about her experiences in Paris in her weekly videoblog. Find out more and watch the episodes at the On Location French page.

Dutch, Flemish and Arabic

We’re delighted to be launching three new courses in our ever-popular One Minute Languages series. One of the most requested languages over the past few years has been Dutch, and we’ve decided to produce a Dutch and Flemish version of the course. Both languages are very similar – Flemish is the variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium, and of course Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and in other countries around the world such as Suriname and Aruba. One Minute Dutch launches on Thursday 20th October and One Minute Flemish will be published on Fridays from 21st October. We’ve also been asked many times to produce an Arabic version of our One Minute Languages course. One Minute Arabic will run for ten weeks from tomorrow, Wednesday 19th October. We’re concentrating on Modern Standard Arabic which will ensure that as a learner you’ll be understood across the Arab world, from Casablanca to Kuwait. With these latest additions to the One Minute Languages series, we now cover 26 languages, from Arabic to Zulu making Radio Lingua your first stop for language-learning on the go, literally from A to Z!

What’s coming down the line?

There may be some of you who are looking forward to a third season of Coffee Break Spanish. We’re working on this at the moment and by the time the reruns of Show Time Spanish end in January we should be ready to go with Coffee Break Spanish Season 3. French learners will be very pleased to know that Pierre-Benoît has been wandering about in the streets of Paris again and a second series of Walk, Talk and Learn French is in production. We’re also very excited about the January launch of our new children’s French video course, High Five French. We’ll be releasing more information about all of these projects over the next few months, so stay tuned!

And finally…

Finally, a personal note. Five years ago today, as I uploaded the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish to the internet I had no idea how things would develop. At the time it was really just a personal project – something to keep me involved in Spanish as my “day job” had changed and I was no longer as closely involved in languages. Since then we’ve seen Radio Lingua grow into a successful company, delivering language lessons to millions of learners from all corners of the globe. I’d like to say a personal thank you to all of the brilliant people involved in the production of our courses, and to everyone involved in the day-to-day running of Radio Lingua. Most of all, I’d like to thank you, the listeners, who find our lessons on iTunes, or who come across our videos on YouTube, or who download our ebooks on your iPhones or iPads. Thank you for continuing to use our lessons, and a special thank you to all of our loyal members. Please continue to enjoy our lessons, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about the new shows we’re launching today.

We love doing what we’re doing and we look forward to the next five years, and hopefully many more!

Mark Pentleton
Director, Radio Lingua Ltd

It’s been a busy term for Radio Lingua: in the past three months we’ve published over 90 language lessons, we’ve introduced ebook versions of our courses in our premium memberships and on the iBookstore and we’ve had three of our podcasts listed in the iTunes Rewind best of 2010. We thought we’d take this opportunity to update you on a few important news items.

Festive greetings

Firstly, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our listeners a very happy festive season. We have listeners all around the world and wherever you are, whatever celebrations you’re having as we head towards 2011, we hope that you have a peaceful, restful and happy holiday. All through December we’ve been running our Festive Phrases podcast which has featured daily festive phrases from around the world with the hosts of our various shows. This series has been particularly aimed at schools and we’ve been delighted that so many young language learners around the world have used our daily podcasts to learn some festive greetings in 24 languages. Each day we’ve added the number of speakers of the language featured to a map and by the end of the series listeners were able to send festive greetings to over 2.6 billion people around the world. If you’re a teacher and you’ve been using Festive Phrases with your classes, please send us your feedback.

Coffee Break French Season 3 news

We introduced season 3 of Coffee Break French in October and this week we’ll release episode 10. Since we began season 3 we’ve offered a special introductory price for the premium version of the course which provided 3A (lessons 301-320) and 3B (lessons 321-340) together for a one-off payment of £47 GBP. As of 10th January 2011, season 3A and 3B will cost £37 each, or the complete season 3 will cost £64. This is therefore your last chance to purchase season 3 at the introductory price. Please note that all existing customers who have bought season 3 complete will receive the premium materials for the full season.

UK VAT charges

On 4th January 2011, the UK VAT rate increases from 17.5% to 20%. As a result our prices for EU customers will increase. For example, the current price of Coffee Break French Seasons 1 and 2 complete is £89 + VAT. This equates to £104.57. From 4th January 2011 the price will be £106.80 for EU customers. For Coffee Break Spanish Season 1 the current price is £47 + VAT. This equates to £55.23, but from 4th January the price will be £56.40 for EU customers. These changes do not affect the base prices of our products, so non-EU customers will not be affected. We’ve decided to extend our winter sale until 10th January to help make this transition. This means our sale will now end at midnight GMT on 10th January: continue to use coupon code WINTER2010 until 10th January.

Plans for 2011

We’re looking forward to a new year of language learning with Radio Lingua, and we hope you are too! We’ve been working on lots of new content and we’ll be adding to our range of materials in Spanish, French, German and Italian with new materials for learners. We’ll be extending our One Minute Languages series with Arabic, Dutch, Galician and Hungarian to name but a few, and we’ll be introducing more video content in the coming year. Make sure you visit our site regularly, that you’re a friend of Radio Lingua on Facebook, and that you follow us on Twitter to be the first to hear of all our new content. There’s some very exciting news coming in the next couple of months, so stay tuned!

Finally, we’d like to wish you once again a very happy holiday season, and best wishes for 2011.

Lesson 10 provides the Zulu version of some common phrases which all learners like to know including “good luck” and “I love you” in the language.

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By the end of lesson 9 you’ll learn to ask “how are you” and give suitable answers in Zulu.

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By the end of lesson 8 you’ll learn to count from one to ten in Zulu.

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By the end of lesson 7 you’ll learn to say it’s nice to meet someone in Zulu.

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By the end of lesson 6 you’ll learn to say your name in Zulu and to ask other people what their names are.

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By the end of lesson 5 you’ll continue to learn to deal with language difficulties in Zulu. By the end of this lesson you’ll be able to say that you don’t understand something.

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By the end of lesson 4 you’ll be able to talk about the fact that you’re learning Zulu.

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In lesson 3 of One Minute Zulu you will learn to say that you can speak a little Zulu. In Zulu, the language is known as isiZulu.

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In lesson 2 of One Minute Zulu you will learn a few useful words including “yes”, “no” and “thank you”. You’ll also be introduced to the idea of click consonants, a distinctive aspect of Zulu and other related languages spoken in South Africa.

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In lesson 1 of One Minute Zulu you will learn to say “hello” and “goodbye”. You’ll also learn a little about where Zulu is spoken.

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