Searching through Radio France International...
Monday, October 18, 2010
Radio France International seems to be another fairly good site useful not just for learning the main language the station operates in and promotes (French) but some of the other languages it offers content in as well. Deutsche Welle is the best example of this with its courses such as Deutsch - warum nicht? and Radio D (the former is good as a German course with the other language as a bonus while the latter is a wretched German course that is great for reading and hearing the other language), but RFI has some good content too.
The most obvious example of something a student of French can listen to and use every day is français facile, which is found simply by going to the main page, then clicking on Ecouter RFI, then journaux, then français facile. There is no script for this but it's good for intermediate French students as the content is fairly easy to understand but does not baby the listener.
This one here in Persian and a number of other languages is also particularly interesting. It's called l'affaire du coffret and you can read the description here - it's a detective story told over 60 lessons that begins with the main character waking up in a room with no memory of what happened, and each episode has about four minutes of audio. The audio is partly composed of the dialogue you can see in the pdf included for each lesson:
but it varies by language as the narrator explains the dialogue in the tongue of the listener. - "des nouvelles" - یعنی خبر تازه... - then back to French, then some more Persian, and so on.
The site doesn't seem to be systematically set up though so it's not always easy to find the same content for each language. This page gives links to the course in English, Spanish and German:
but there is no link to the Persian version, and apparently there is an Arabic version as well, and who knows how many other languages.
...ah, if you go to the German page:
it links to the course in Portuguese as well:
after which it's a dead end. Moreover, the Persian page uses RFI's internal player (Flash, I believe) while German will use Windows Media Player to play the same thing. So it's a bit of a mess, but a glorious mess. Let me know in the comments below if there is a page with links to each and every language this course is offered in.
