Mongolian hip hop, Latvian radio, Jojo sucht das Glück

I have three things to share today that I think I'll put in a single post. The first is this song, the first Mongolian hip hop I've ever heard. I have a Mongolian textbook and dictionary here in Korea but have never had the time to give the language a good look over besides skimming through and noticing parts that resemble Turkish and Korean, and thanks to them I feel like giving it a closer look.



Now we go back to Latvian: one great resource for listening and reading can be found right here on Latvijas Radio, in the part called Eiropas ziņas near the bottom. Also Biznesa ziņas right below. The text and audio almost always match up, especially when Jānis Zariņš is reading the script. For some reason one of the female staff there enjoys veering from the script as much as possible so watch out for her as she will just confuse you. In spite of her efforts to confuse students of Latvian the rest of it is extremely good, and having such a resource is quite rare for a language of its size. I have yet to find anything of this sort for Estonian and Lithuanian, and I've asked around quite a bit too. Luckily there is Lithuanian Out Loud, but Estonia's national broadcaster only has a few videos with subtitles that match about three quarters of the time.

The last resource to mention is another instance where Deutsche Welle has outdone itself. Not content with merely creating German courses with audio and pdfs, they have created a telenovela for German students called Jojo sucht das Glück about a girl from Brazil who moves to Köln and...well, I haven't gotten to the end yet and neither have they. 22 episodes are out now and I think there are ten left, one a week. Each episode is only about three to four minutes, and the best way to go over it is: 1) watch the video with German subtitles, 2) read the dialogue and grammatical notes on pdf, 3) watch the video again, and then go on to the next episode. Deutsche Welle continues to blow all the other national broadcasters out of the water in the quality of the materials they produce. No other broadcaster I've seen comes even close.