Duolingo podcast: The kiddnapping of Luis von Ahn's aunt | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo podcast: The kiddnapping of Luis von Ahn's aunt

podcast.duolingo.com

49 pointsimartin2k36 comments

Does anyone know where I can find podcasts to improve German?

I second this

If you're a beginner, I'd listen to "Deutsch – Warum Nicht?" from DW. It's narrated in English but the main character speaks in German. Radio D is another podcast from DW at about the same level.

From there I like Coffee Break German because it has a language expert and a native speaker discussing German words and grammar in a classroom/conversational setting. Again, this one is narrated in English but they're talking about the German language.

DaZPod is also great for short little clips, completely in German. Once you're ready for the full-on German stuff, Langsam Gesprochene Nachrichten has a new podcast every day where they read world news, slowly and clearly articulated, completely in German.

Of course most of these come with transcripts you can read along with to improve your German reading comprehension as well.

-edit: check out DW.com and look for their German courses... they have a ton of podcasts for all levels, and they're really good.

>Deutsch – Warum Nicht?

If you don't mind listening to a really weird drama about a hotel porter who's having some kind of psychotic episode. I'm not knocking it, but it's bloody strange.

It really is. You have to have a sense of humor and a bit of imagination because boy them Germans don't mess around with their fairy tales.

https://slowgerman.com/

The best I've found is Slow German: https://slowgerman.com

The presenter speaks slowly (as the name suggests) and clearly, and there are over 100 episodes on a variety of topics, so there's probably something to suit your interests and level.

Deutsche Welle also have podcasts and videos at various levels and you can download a slowly-read news broadcast ("Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten") every day: http://www.dw.com/en/learn-german/s-2469

Or for a normal speed news broadcast for native speakers, you can subscribe to ZDF's "Tagesschau" or "Tagesthemen" podcast, or watch a video of "news in 100 seconds": https://www.tagesschau.de

I'm also interested to hear more recommendations!

And how about Dutch podcast for beginners to improve listening skills? Any suggestions?

Check out the Dutch Broadcast Service (http://www.nos.nl). Quite a few of their stories have text and video.

NOS Radio 1 also has a daily podcast 'De Dag' (https://www.nporadio1.nl/homepage/8030-podcast-dedag-quote).

These are not really for beginners though.

Another general news site is http://www.nu.nl. Lots of short news articles, often from press bureaux. Easy to dip into for a few minutes.

When I started learning Dutch, I initially found it very hard to relate the sounds vs written words. My approach for listening comprehension was find a short news story with accompanying written text, and simply listen to it over and over again, alternating with the text and without, gradually getting used to the sound and flow of the language. My approach for speaking was careful repetition of sentences from language courses.

Good luck!

Thanks! OOC - what level do you have and how long did it take to achieve it? I am expecting to reach A2 by the EOY.

My progress was pretty quick due to forced immersion. Essentially:

Year #1 - Self-study with books/audio courses. Got me up to reading simple newspaper articles, struggling with TV news.

Year #2 - Started with a week-long residential Dutch course. It felt like I didn't learn much new grammar or vocab, but suddenly I was thinking in Dutch, no longer mentally translating. Very expensive but definitely worth it. - Then my company (management consultants) decided I was ready to work full time in Dutch with Dutch clients. The first month was very tiring: I felt 20% IQ points dumber, and could either listen or speak in meetings, not fast enough to do both at once :)

Year 3 - After that, I was ok working in Dutch and speaking it socially.

Year 4 - By the time I left the Netherlands, I was managing a team of 25 Dutch people, doing meetings, performance reviews in Dutch.

I subsequently ended up marrying a Dutch guy. While we left the Netherlands 7 years ago and now live in London, at home we speak probably 30% Dutch/70% English.

Dutch was never a language I expected to learn. But I am very glad I did. The sounds of the language still make me smile :)

Not a podcast, but I have been using chatterbug.com for the last 2-3 months. It really helps me improve my German, especially through live lessons.

Would love to listen to this. But as a native spanish speaker, this is unbearable

Why is that?

They speak too slow

I would expect a native to think language learning courses are spoken too slowly for their liking. The most common complaint among language learners is that natives speak too quickly, so of course learning material will be slowed down so students can hear every word being said.

Exactly. I thought it was a great speed, and there really aren't many slow-spanish resources online which makes it hard to transcend intermediate hell.

The English sections work well to give you context for the Spanish sections. Losing track of context is definitely one of the hardest parts of listening to a different language. "Wait, I thought we were still talking about his aunt." The English also makes it more of a leisurely exposure.

Another issue I have with most resources is that there's no way to easily replay chunks of audio. I'd prefer to be able to listen to bite-sized chunks until I understand them. I built https://www.danneu.com/slow-spanish/ (the three lil pigs) to prototype an idea where you listen to a story and can prev/next/replay any sentence.

Your page works nicely. I am making the 'hardware' version, a sentence-based multilingual audio player, maybe you find it interesting:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipPPzL7dZnJ9CzHblHCLtJJT...

Some more details about the software toolchain for preparing files here, the idea is to turn any native audio/video into bilingual, sentence-based materials for studying.

https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=716...

The toolchain will also prepare nice bilingual texts: http://smallworld.press/show_hn.html

There are social media links on http://smallworld.press/ if you want to be updated.

I second that.

Native English/Spanish speaker... having one paragraph in English and one in Spanish is very confusing.

It's an interesting format for a Podcast, but the written version really messes with your brain. Specially given that sometimes the following sentence translates part of the previous paragraph, but then sometimes adds additional context or continues the story.

In audio form, as a learner, it's awesome. It's like a mini pitstop for your brain. If you had 20 minutes of nonstop foreign language, your brain can lose track and be overwhelmed. They make really good use of the pitstops by paraphrasing a particularly difficult passage, adding more context with tenses or vocab that would be too difficult for the level, or to straight up define a word.

> Native English/Spanish speaker... having one paragraph in English and one in Spanish is very confusing.

Really? You'd think that with the common Spanglish practice of code-switching mid-sentence, switching every paragraph would be a breeze.

As a beginner/intermediate Spanish learner, it's awesome. I have been listening to all 8 episodes and already long for season 2.

I'm barely intermediate (B1 by cefr) and its unbearable. The stories are ok and its probably nice to get some practice at listening. Tho when I was just starting to learn I still preferred podcasts that had less english in them.

If you're not aware of it, radioambulante.org is great.

Terrible moments. And Guatemala paid the steepest price: lost a brilliant scientist that would be working there to make the country a better place.

The idea of someone like this being deported with the stroke of a bureaucrat's pen is sickening.

not to spoil your day but:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/02/0...

The idea that people (especially those with criminal backgrounds) can willfully break the law and can enter the country without going through the proper channels that millions of others go through to become legal residents each year is sickening.

It's amazing how effective the media has been at painting people who agree with you as racists who hate all central/south americans.

Yea. As an Indian it's hard to believe people are propping up illegal immigration. It takes decades for an Indian to legally migrate here. Maybe we should just become illegals. Perhaps then we will get some sympathy from the media and the liberal class.

rvo: I want more immigrants, full stop. I want us to invest in identifying high-value immigrants and supporting their naturalization [I think Tyler Cowen argues in favor of many many more creative / non-service space immigrants, ie non-doctors/lawyers, and that seems right to me].

Don't make democrats choose between Latinx and Indian immigrants - we want both. We don't have any power in this country right now. Thus, democrats in Congress are trying to keep provisions that support Latinx immigrants - "Dreamers". From an economic perspective, that makes sense: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-09-13/-dreamer-...

Ideally, we would have better-design systems for immigration, but we don't. We have to be practical and work with what we've got. [and yes, in the distant future if the current form of the Democratic party controls Congress, hopefully it will remember its current desires to help immigrants (and refugees) from all countries]

Why tolerate illegal immigration and make legal immigration so hard? Do you see how out of whack the incentives are? I did a BS and MS from good schools here... Pay tens of thousands in taxes every year due to my high income. But I am in constant worry as I am on a h1b and have a pending green card. In the mean time, I am seeing illegal aliens, hundreds of thousands of them, get EAD cards! I don't even have an EAD. I am enslaved to my company (good thing I like my job!). With EAD you don't even have that issue.

Of course I don't have an issue with latin people. I got an issue with illegals being given preference over legals. There are many Indian illegal immigrats too. They overstay visa. I met a cab driver from India who described in detail how he illegally migrated via the Mexico border. Now he has an EAD card somehow. It's so bizzare.

Do what Canada does. Use point system. And please remove the racist "national origin" quota for immigration. See the racially allocated dates here: https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/legal/visa-law0/v.... They are currently "processing" Indians who applied in 2008!! China is 2013. But Mexicans and everyone else, it's "current" (meaning no waiting).

It selectively harm's Indians and Chinese, the most educated immigrants to this country. Literally, there is a special column for Indian, Chinese and Mexicans in the green card line. Make it country agonistic and use points that select for highly educated, English speaking immigrants. Then you can have such great quality of immigrants as Canada.

I love this country but it hurts when my friends (all liberal Democrats ) continuously care more about illegals than their friend who has been in this country for 15 years and still in the queue for the greencard ...

Yes - agreed on your proposed changes!

In general, I think (I hope!) if your friends understood the system, they would be more supportive here, too. Democrats should be united in support of all immigrants and especially removing racist restrictions.

Isn't it frequently easier for people to break the law than go through proper channels to accomplish a goal?

Eg driving a car without a license, import goods, repair a tractor (shudder, obviously)

Since they are replying to a comment that thinks deportation is sickening, I think they are saying that it's sickening that someone to willfully break the law yet be immune to deportation.

This is one of the hot topic controversies in the states right now. For example, deportation is now often rebranded as "breaking up families" in the media which now makes you that bad guy to suggest it.

Thanks for the response!

It seems like one should be able to be against both: breaking up families is crappy and totally not fun. We also don't want people to think breaking the law is the best/only way to support [or be with] their family!

But these problems don't have easy solutions. You can feel bad for [deporting] a model citizen who is also in a country illegally while simultaneously wanting to limit the number of people in the country illegally.

Unfortunately, all decisions in this space have [sometimes surprising] consequences. One of my most brilliant colleagues will not be staying in the US for very long because he is an only child and wants to be closer to his parents as they age [there is a provision that allows naturalized citizens to obtain green cards for their parents for exactly this purpose, but it is reeeallly slow - and he has no guarantees it won't be shut down before his parents receive green cards].

On these paradoxes and contradictions, I can't help but think of Hamilton: "The Constitution's a mess" [so it needs Amendments] "It's full of contradictions" [so is independence!]

This guy doesn't have a criminal background, nor did he cross the border illegally.

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