Deutsche Welle's Radio D part 2 now available in Persian

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I haven't checked the site for about two months or so, so I'm not sure exactly when the update happened, but now Deutsche Welle's Radio D part 2 is available in Persian. I've written before about using either Deutsch - Warum Nicht? (older than Radio D and the pdf is less detailed but the story is great) or Radio D to learn other languages besides German, but have been a bit hard on Radio D for the inane content in part 1.

Just to explain how this works: Deutsche Welle has a number of language courses for people of various linguistic backgrounds to learn German, but since the courses are often quite easy and many of us either know some German, have it as a mother tongue, or want to learn it eventually, it is a good way to learn other languages, or other languages while brushing up on German at the same time. The PDF for example will look like this:

where the German content is always the same, while the part explaining what the people are saying in German is in various languages - Persian, Turkish, Bulgarian, Portuguese, etc. Since the content in the other language is written out in full, it makes a very good resource for those learning less-studied languages where finding text corresponding with spoken recordings difficult.

Also, now that we're on to part 2 the course content is much less inane than before. The voice of the character Compu is still annoying, but at least they are not spending five minutes before saying Guten Tag and Der Kaffee ist gut anymore. Part 1 was a weird mix of much too simple German, way too much background noise (one example: Josephine cleans the offices of Radio D for a few minutes before finally picking up the phone and saying that no one is there, resulting in 95% vacuum cleaner noise and 5% actual German practice), and regional dialects at the same time. Part 2 so far at least feels like a real story.

Finally, in case you missed it: Mohsen Sazegara's videos are another great resource if you're learning Persian.

0 comments:

  © Blogger templates Newspaper by Ourblogtemplates.com 2008

Back to TOP