Show Time Spanish

Feliz año nuevo, buon anno,  bonne année und ein frohes neues Jahr to the entire Coffee Break learning community around the world. We hope that 2016 is a happy, healthy and successful year for you, and that you have many opportunities to put your language skills to use over the coming months.

We’re delighted to bring you this update from Radio Lingua at the beginning of 2016. We’ve had a very busy holiday period with the launch of our new Coffee Break Academy website and the Coffee Break French and Spanish Masterclass programmes, but more about that a bit later.

Looking back at 2015

Let’s begin by taking a look back at 2015 and what it meant for Coffee Break language learners. We completed our fourth season of Coffee Break French and we launched our fourth season of Coffee Break Spanish last year. We also introduced a brand new language with Coffee Break Italian, along with our children’s show High Five French.

Over the year we delivered over 21 million free language lessons and this means that on average over 59,000 lessons were downloaded every day. In other words, language learners around the world downloaded 41 of our lessons every minute of 2015.

What’s coming in 2016

We spent much of last year producing new content for this coming year: we’ve been filming and recording in Spain, France and Germany for new and existing projects. We can’t say too much about some of these projects just yet, but you can look forward to exciting, new content and we’re sure you’ll enjoy continuing your learning journey with us.

* Coffee Break Spanish Season 4 continues with episode 21 released on 27th January.

* We’ll be launching the second of our Coffee Break French Season 4 Companion ebooks in the next few weeks.

* We’re excited to be releasing our brand new video course High Five Spanish for younger learners in the summer.

* We had planned to record the final section of Coffee Break Italian Season 1 in Italy earlier this month but unfortunately this visit had to be postponed. We’ll be publishing some top-up episodes to help our Italian learners keep up their skills until we can rearrange the visit to Francesca’s homeland.

* And finally, we can confirm that there will be new Coffee Break German content in 2016!

The Masterclass

Our biggest news is the launch of our special 12-month course for intermediate learners of Spanish and French, the Coffee Break Masterclass. We’ve built a brand new website, the Coffee Break Academy, where you can join the Masterclass and become a master of the language. We’ve been listening very carefully to your feedback and have put together this innovative course which combines our regular, structured audio lessons with challenges, tasks and a discussion area. There are already many members interacting every day in the Masterclass forums, practising what they’re learning in the audio lessons and completing our challenges and exercises.

Each month there’s a new module, and you’ll receive lessons every 3 or 4 days. We’ll deliver everything straight to your inbox and the best thing about the Masterclass is that it starts when you’re ready for it. So if you join today you will receive your orientation module and lesson 1, then lesson 2 will follow in a few days’ time. The feedback so far on the Masterclass has been fantastic and we̵...

As we approach the end of 2014, Mark has recorded a special news podcast to look back at the past 12 months and to look forward to some of the exciting new content coming in 2015.

Looking back

2014 has been an exciting year for us here at Radio Lingua. We’ve released 84 episodes across our range of courses including Coffee Break French Season 4, our new Coffee Break Spanish Espresso and Coffee Break German which has just finished its first season. We’ve also introduced our new gameshow, the Coffee Break French and Coffee Break Spanish Two Minute Challenges.

In 2014 we have delivered over 16 million free language lessons to our learners around the world, bringing the total number of free language lessons delivered since we started back in 2006 to over 155 million! We hope you’ve enjoyed learning one of the 26 languages we offer!

High Five French Family Edition

This year we’ve also introduced our French course for younger learners, High Five French, featuring presenters Emma and Mathilde. High Five French has been popular in schools throughout the UK and we’ve just released the Family Edition of High Five French, so if you have children or grandchildren who would like to learn French with this fantastic video resource, you can find out more here. Early in the New Year we’ll be offering some free High Five French audio lessons – there’s more information in the news podcast, and you can learn more about High Five French here. If you’re interested in using High Five French in a school, please visit our Schools page.

Coffee Break Spanish Season 4

We’ve also announced our fourth season of Coffee Break Spanish. From January 2015 you can join presenters Mark and Carmen as they follow a serialised story featuring a range of characters from around the Spanish-speaking world. This show has been specially created to help advanced learners of Spanish build their confidence in tricky grammatical constructions and increase their range of idiomatic expressions. Find out more  about Season 4 here.

Coffee Break Italian

We’re also introducing a new series for Italian learners. In January 2015 we’ll be launching Coffee Break Italian. The forty lessons of this first season will introduce learners to the language and you’ll start to develop confidence in using the language in a variety of situations. Mark takes on the role of teacher for Coffee Break Italian and is joined by learner Katie and native speaker Francesca. There’s more information about Coffee Break Italian here.

Mark’s learning Swedish

As we move into a new year it’s the perfect time to start learning a new language or to commit to improving your existing language skills. Mark is making his own New Year’s Resolution to learn Swedish and will be keeping a blog of his experiences. You can follow his adventures here.

Our Sale is still on

Finally, don’t forget that our End Of Year Sale is still on and you can save 15% on all our courses with coupon code WINTER2014. This includes the option to preorder Coffee Break Spanish Season 4 and Coffee Break Italian. You can check out the terms and conditions here.

This is a short message from Radio Lingua to update you on developments and to send all of our listeners our warmest wishes for the festive season.

First of all, we’ve been extremely busy assembling the various parts of the Coffee Break German course. Coffee Break German will be aimed at complete beginners in the language and, following the well-loved relaxed but structured Coffee Break style, we’ll be teaching German in weekly episodes, starting on 23rd January 2013. The whole Coffee Break German team are very excited about the launch and Mark is looking forward to picking up German along with the listeners!

We’re coming to the end of the first season of the Coffee Break Spanish Magazine. The Magazine features interviews with native speakers, tips on idiomatic Spanish and a question and answer section and it has gone down extremely well with our listeners. In particular the video interviews have received great reviews and we’ll be planning to add more video content to our language courses in the future. We’re working hard on more Magazine content – not just for Spanish – and we’ll announce more news about this in the new year.

If you’re interested in the premium version of the Magazine which gives you access to these videos – or indeed the premium version of any of our language courses, then you may be interested to know that we’re currently in the middle of our Winter Sale. It ends at one minute to midnight UK time on the 31st December – or Hogmanay as we call it in Scotland – so don’t miss out on getting a head start on your language learning in 2013. There’s more information about the sale at https://radiolingua.com/sale including the coupon code that you need to use to get your discount.

Finally, if you’re still trying to think up a last-minute gift for you friends or family members, you may be interested in our new gift memberships: you can buy a friend a membership to many of our courses. It’s really straightforward – simply purchase a gift membership and we’ll send you a printable gift certificate which contains all the details to allow your language-loving friend to have free access to the course materials. Find out more at https://radiolingua.com/gift/.

The audio version of this news broadcast is provided below along with download links. In addition to the information, Mark has also included a special rendition of one of his favourite pieces of festive music. He’s performed this himself on the piano, so we hope you enjoy it!

Welcome to this festive edition of Radio Lingua News. In this update we’ll be telling you about the fantastic milestone we reached this week, and explaining how you can save 25% on our premium memberships until the end of the year.

100 million downloads

Early on Friday morning we clocked up our 100 millionth download. Over the past five years learners from around the world have downloaded our free language lessons and we’re delighted to have reached this amazing milestone. We’d like to thank all our listeners for continuing to enjoy our language lessons, and a special thank you to all our members who help to support all of our developments.

Winter sale now on

To celebrate this milestone we’ve launched our winter sale, so you can now get 25% off our memberships and premium versions of the courses. In most cases these premium versions include lesson guides in pdf or ebook format and extra audio or video content. All the courses available on our website can be purchased at this special reduced rate by using the coupon code winter2011 at checkout. The sale will continue until midnight on New Year’s Eve – or Hogmanay as we say in Scotland, so you still have almost two weeks to take advantage of these special prices, and get a head start on your language learning for 2012.

Update on current shows

The reaction to our new show for Spanish learners, Q&A Spanish, has been fantastic. We’re delighted that lots of you are now emailing us with your questions, or leaving voicemails so that we can include your questions in the show. JP and Nahyeli are enjoying answering your questions – even the difficult ones! If you’re learning Spanish and you’ve not yet listened to Q&A Spanish, you can find out more about the show, download the episodes, and find out how to contact us to ask your question at qandaspanish.com. We’re also really pleased with On Location French, our new video blog produced by Sophie in Paris. Sophie records her regular videos with a small camera and microphone all on her own in Paris and although we had some teething problems with sound, things are settling down now. She’s been including some really interesting phrases – and this week’s expression is a fantastic construction to add to your vocabulary! You can access On Location French on iTunes, Blip.TV or of course at onlocationfrench.com. Turning to our other courses, although we’ve had a delay with our new One Minute Languages series, we’re getting back on track and there will be new episodes out this week of our Dutch, Flemish and Arabic courses. As far as Coffee Break French is concerned, we’re now into the final eight lessons of Season 3 and in these episodes we’ll be going back through the texts used in this season and picking out some of the most important grammar points, then helping learners practise these constructions with a series of translation and dictation exercises. There will be lots of extra members-only content, so with our winter sale currently on, perhaps now is the time to take advantage of our special pricing.

Happy holidays!

Finally, we’d like to wish you all a very happy holiday season and hope that you get the chance to relax, spend time with your friends and family, enjoying everything that the festive season brings, and get the chance to work on your language – or put it into practice if you happen to be travelling! Don’t forget that you can join us in our Festive Phrases video series each day of December until the 25th to learn a festive greeting in a different language. Use the link on the home page of the Radio Lingua site to open each day of our linguistic Advent Calendar.

It’s five years since we launched the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish, and since then we’ve served up millions of language lessons to learners around the world through our podcasts, our enhanced lessons and our ebooks. We’re delighted today to announce five new courses, and we’ll also be letting you know about a few exciting projects which are due to be launched early in 2012.

Spanish

¡Empecemos con el español! On the 18th October 2006 we began with Spanish, and we’re doing the same today. Today we’re delighted to launch a brand new Spanish show. When you’re learning a language on your own, or if you don’t have access to a teacher or a native speaker, it’s difficult to get the answers you need to help you make progress. We receive questions almost every day from learners through posts on the website, emails, voicemails, tweets and Facebook, and we decided that the best way to deal with all of these questions would be to launch Q&A Spanish: you ask the questions and we provide the answers. Q&A Spanish will be hosted by teacher and languages expert JP Villanueva and native Spanish speaker Nahyeli Mendivil, so you have the best of both worlds! Each week they’ll help you develop your confidence in Spanish further by providing tips and examples of Spanish vocabulary, usage and grammar. Q&A Spanish starts today, so you can already subscribe to the podcast. Click here to find out more about how you can take part in the show.

French

We’re also delighted to be announcing a brand new French video show. In On Location French you can join Sophie who is a UK student currently studying in Paris. She’s there for a year and she’s agreed to be our “correspondent”, bringing us weekly reports on interesting expressions she learns as she interacts with native speakers every day. Sophie will also be providing some cultural input as she gets to know the city, and we’re really looking forward to finding out more about her experiences in Paris in her weekly videoblog. Find out more and watch the episodes at the On Location French page.

Dutch, Flemish and Arabic

We’re delighted to be launching three new courses in our ever-popular One Minute Languages series. One of the most requested languages over the past few years has been Dutch, and we’ve decided to produce a Dutch and Flemish version of the course. Both languages are very similar – Flemish is the variety of Dutch spoken in Belgium, and of course Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and in other countries around the world such as Suriname and Aruba. One Minute Dutch launches on Thursday 20th October and One Minute Flemish will be published on Fridays from 21st October. We’ve also been asked many times to produce an Arabic version of our One Minute Languages course. One Minute Arabic will run for ten weeks from tomorrow, Wednesday 19th October. We’re concentrating on Modern Standard Arabic which will ensure that as a learner you’ll be understood across the Arab world, from Casablanca to Kuwait. With these latest additions to the One Minute Languages series, we now cover 26 languages, from Arabic to Zulu making Radio Lingua your first stop for language-learning on the go, literally from A to Z!

What’s coming down the line?

There may be some of you who are looking forward to a third season of Coffee Break Spanish. We’re working on this at the moment and by the time the reruns of Show Time Spanish end in January we should be ready to go with Coffee Break Spanish Season 3...

It’s been a busy term for Radio Lingua: in the past three months we’ve published over 90 language lessons, we’ve introduced ebook versions of our courses in our premium memberships and on the iBookstore and we’ve had three of our podcasts listed in the iTunes Rewind best of 2010. We thought we’d take this opportunity to update you on a few important news items.

Festive greetings

Firstly, we’d like to take this opportunity to wish all our listeners a very happy festive season. We have listeners all around the world and wherever you are, whatever celebrations you’re having as we head towards 2011, we hope that you have a peaceful, restful and happy holiday. All through December we’ve been running our Festive Phrases podcast which has featured daily festive phrases from around the world with the hosts of our various shows. This series has been particularly aimed at schools and we’ve been delighted that so many young language learners around the world have used our daily podcasts to learn some festive greetings in 24 languages. Each day we’ve added the number of speakers of the language featured to a map and by the end of the series listeners were able to send festive greetings to over 2.6 billion people around the world. If you’re a teacher and you’ve been using Festive Phrases with your classes, please send us your feedback.

Coffee Break French Season 3 news

We introduced season 3 of Coffee Break French in October and this week we’ll release episode 10. Since we began season 3 we’ve offered a special introductory price for the premium version of the course which provided 3A (lessons 301-320) and 3B (lessons 321-340) together for a one-off payment of £47 GBP. As of 10th January 2011, season 3A and 3B will cost £37 each, or the complete season 3 will cost £64. This is therefore your last chance to purchase season 3 at the introductory price. Please note that all existing customers who have bought season 3 complete will receive the premium materials for the full season.

UK VAT charges

On 4th January 2011, the UK VAT rate increases from 17.5% to 20%. As a result our prices for EU customers will increase. For example, the current price of Coffee Break French Seasons 1 and 2 complete is £89 + VAT. This equates to £104.57. From 4th January 2011 the price will be £106.80 for EU customers. For Coffee Break Spanish Season 1 the current price is £47 + VAT. This equates to £55.23, but from 4th January the price will be £56.40 for EU customers. These changes do not affect the base prices of our products, so non-EU customers will not be affected. We’ve decided to extend our winter sale until 10th January to help make this transition. This means our sale will now end at midnight GMT on 10th January: continue to use coupon code WINTER2010 until 10th January.

Plans for 2011

We’re looking forward to a new year of language learning with Radio Lingua, and we hope you are too! We’ve been working on lots of new content and we’ll be adding to our range of materials in Spanish, French, German and Italian with new materials for learners. We’ll be extending our One Minute Languages series with Arabic, Dutch, Galician and Hungarian to name but a few, and we’ll be introducing more video content in the coming year. Make sure you visit our site regularly, that you’re a friend of Radio Lingua on Facebook, and that you follow us on Twitter to be the first to hear of all our ...

So, you’ve been learning Spanish with Coffee Break Spanish, and perhaps you’ve been extending your knowledge with Show Time Spanish. Today we’re delighted to introduce a new show to help you build your vocabulary and develop your listening skills even further.

News Time Spanish is a new weekly show from the Radio Lingua Network aimed at intermediate to advanced learners of Spanish. Each week we’ll be bringing you stories from around the world in short reports, written especially for learners. We’ll be reporting on current affairs, sport, culture, technology and lots more, so News Time Spanish will be an excellent way to increase your Spanish vocabulary and build your range of expression.

The first season of News Time Spanish begins today, 17th May 2010 and you can listen to episode one on our site, or subscribe in iTunes, as usual. Each episode comes with a full transcript of the report, vocabulary and exercises, and there’s even a second version of the audio file which has been digitally slowed-down to help you understand the episode.

Find out more about News Time Spanish on the product page for the show.

2009 has been a fantastic year for Radio Lingua and we’d like to thank all our listeners for your support and enthusiasm over the past twelve months. To celebrate the end of 2009 and a new year of language-learning just around the corner, we’re delighted to announce our Holidays sale and give you some exciting advance notice of our plans for 2010. Read on!

No festive period is complete without a sale, and we’re offering you 25% off all our courses right through until 31 December, midnight GMT. If you’ve been thinking about taking your language-learning more seriously next year, perhaps now is the time to jump on board and purchase one of our Season Passes. We’re delighted to be able to offer free language-learning materials to hundreds of thousands of listeners around the world, but you can take your learning to a new level with our premium materials which include lesson guides, extra listening materials and exericses for each of our courses.

To receive your 25% discount, simply use the coupon code holidays09 (lower case) at checkout when you’re buying one of our courses. If you’ve not purchased an item from us before, you can view our full range of products here, or visit the appropriate store front for Coffee Break French, Coffee Break Spanish, Show Time Spanish, One Minute Languages, or School Run French. When you complete the form, make sure you enter holidays09 in the coupon code area at the bottom of the signup page.

Please note that the 25% reduction will be applied at checkout. EU customers should be aware that the prices quoted on our signup pages do not include VAT. If you use the coupon code then the 25% discount will be applied and then 17.5% VAT will be added to the total cost. It’s worth also pointing out that as of 1st January 2010, the VAT charges will have to increase to 17.5% in line with the Inland Revenue arrangements in the UK.

Please remember to use the coupon code as you’re purchasing: no refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price if the coupon codes have not been used.

Would you like to purchase a gift membership? If so, please contact us at [email protected] and we’ll get things set up for you. Let us know what product you wish to buy and the email address of the recipient. We’ll process your payment and send the gift membership invitation in time for Christmas. Please note that the deadline for any Christmas gifts is 17 December.

New for 2010: the Radio Lingua Club. We’ve been listening to comments from our existing premium customers and one of the most common requests is for more help and advice for learning languages. We’ve decided therefore to create a ‘club’ around this. Membership to the club will last 12 months and during this time members will receive the following benefits:

* Weekly podcasts in a brand new “how to learn a language” series featuring tips, tricks and advice on learning language. We’ll also be including interviews with language learners from all walks of life who will share their learning tips. The course will feature tips for beginners and for experienced learners and we’re sure that everyone will be able to benefit from this course, regardless of the language they are learning.

* Reduced prices on all our content. Members will have access to a special discount rate for any purchases made within the membership period.

We’re delighted to be joined once more by Alba in this special episode of Show Time Spanish. It’s the last ‘normal’ episode in the series: next week we’ll have the eighth and final instalment of Verano Español, so lesson 39 is the final ‘normal’ episode in the series. We find out what Alba has been doing since before the summer and Mark takes the opportunity to test listeners on some of the phrases learned earlier in the series.

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In this episode Mark is joined by Sofía from Argentina and Ana Isabel from Ecuador. Language points discussed include the difference between si no and sino, using hace with a time phrase, and voseo, the use of vos in Rioplatense Spanish.

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