Radio Lingua Network News: 8 October 2007

Bonjour, Guten Morgen, Buenos días, Buongiorno! This is Mark from the Radio Lingua Network and I'm here to bring you some of the latest news about our language-learning materials. Today sees the launch of unit five of Coffee Break Spanish. In this unit, and indeed in this second 'level' of Coffee Break Spanish we're going to be getting into the language in a much deeper way. This will hopefully allow listeners to create the language more, to say what you want to say, rather than sticking to the phrases of previous lessons. Of course we've been teaching you all along how to change words to 'make the phrase your own', but we're going to be introducing some new concepts in this unit which will put you in control of the language you're learning. Lesson 41 introduces the concept of conjugating verbs. It all sounds a bit complicated, but we'll be taking things nice and easy as usual! You can subscribe to the programme for free at www.coffeebreakspanish.com. Since our last edition of the Radio Lingua News podcast, we've launched Coffee Break French. I was in Paris with our French team and along with my cohost Anna we released the first show from the Eiffel Tower. We also shot some video footage for subsequent lessons in Paris, and did some filming for a new project we'll be telling you about soon. We've been overwhelmed with the reaction to CBF: within a few days the podcast was the #1 UK Education podcast on iTunes - even knocking CBS off the top spot! In just over a week we've had around 50,000 downloads and the feedback is great so far. In a couple of weeks' time we'll be introducing the premium version of the programme, and you can find out more on www.coffeebreakfrench.com. I mentioned in our last news programme that we're reworking the store and the purchasing options for all our podcasts. We're still working on this and some other events over the past two weeks have delayed this a little. We're still hoping to introduce the new version of the store in a couple of weeks, so do make sure you're checking the Radio Lingua site regularly. Our problems of the last couple of weeks have included spam attacks on our CBS forum. We had been using a hosted forum since the early days of CBS, and this was possibly the reason for the problems. We decided this week to relaunch the forum as a generic Radio Lingua forum on our own servers, giving us more control over spam filtering. It also means that there's now somewhere for all our learners, so whether you're listening to CBS, CBF, MDPG, MDPI or any of our future podcasts and languages, there's somewhere for you to go and practise your language skills. Most importantly, the forum is a place where you can share your learning with other learners and help each other out. Unfortunately the new forum setup does mean that users will need to sign up again to the forum. It's a very quick process so please don't let that put you off. We look forward to seeing you over on the forum where you can practise your language skills and join the RL community. To access the forum, visit www.radiolingua.com and click on "Discussion Forum" in the menu. And finally, if anyone is in the London area at the beginning of November we're going to be at the Language Show at Olympia from Friday 2nd until Sunday 4th November. This is the UK's biggest event for language learners and teachers and you can get free tickets from the Language Show website at www.thelanguageshow.co.uk. We'll have a booth at the stand and we'll be showing off some of our new products and services. It would be great to meet some of our listeners, so come along and say "hola", "salut", "hallo" or "ciao" to us at stand 42. There will be more details about exactly what we're going to be showing off at the Language Show in our next news programme! And that's it for this edition of Radio Lingua News. Thanks for listening!