Improve Your French With the New Duolingo Podcast
To get your bachelor’s degree at my university, you needed to be fluent in a foreign language.
After four years of studying French in high school and three years of French in college, I was still … struggling. My saving grace was the French lessons that were held in France in the summer before the senior class. My logic that turned out to be correct was that they wouldn’t let you down if you drove all the way to France to try not to fail.
I still speak very bad French.
During the summer courses, I really did get a lot better, in part because I really did talk to people regularly in French or any other horrible translation of the language I could find. Watching TV and movies in any language and communicating can greatly improve your understanding. Duolingo is adding a new podcast in French to its platform today to help you do just that.
Each episode of the podcast will include a true story told by a native speaker in understandable French. There will also be an English speaking presenter throughout, so you can keep up even if you can’t understand everything the French speaker is saying.
The French podcast follows in the footsteps of the Spanish podcast Duolingo, which launched in December 2017 and has been downloaded over 13 million times.
If you don’t speak French then the podcast can be difficult to understand, but the content has been chosen to be understandable for intermediate French learners. The native speaker on the podcast speaks more slowly than in real French conversation, so it will be easier for beginners to catch every word.
Duolingo sent me a few episodes early so I could take them for a test drive. As someone who spoke this language about ten years ago, I was still able to understand what was happening. There were definitely bits and pieces that I struggled through, but this is also kind of a gist – you want to learn something new.
The first episode is out today, and the next five episodes of the first season of the podcast will be released one after the other over the next weeks. The podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, and Stitcher, and the Duolingo website .
And while you’re adding new podcasts, be sure to check out Lifehacker’s The Upgrade .