It’s been a busy year for us here at Radio Lingua and we thought we’d take this opportunity to look back through the 2017. We hope you enjoy reliving some of the highlights of the year with us.

Masterclass launch

On 1st January we launched our Coffee Break French and Spanish Masterclass courses. These are 6-month coaching courses which will help intermediate learners build on their existing knowledge and take it further in a number of areas including pronouns, idiomatic expressions, tricky verbs and the famous subjunctive. Learners have been working through the modules of the Masterclass all year. At the moment the Masterclass is being moved over to our new Coffee Break Academy (see below) so it’s not available for enrollment, but as soon as it’s available again we’ll make an announcement on the website and on our social media profiles.

High Five Spanish

Having spent several weeks in the south of Spain during 2015 filming our series for younger learners of Spanish we were delighted to launch our educational version of High Five Spanish for schools in May. The first series of lessons in the family version is also now available in our Coffee Break Academy: click here for more information.

Coffee Break Italian 1 concludes

We spent a few days in northern Italy in April to record the final batch of lessons of Coffee Break Italian Season 1. Highlights included Katie’s cookery lesson with la mamma di Francesca, and recording this perla di saggezza on the shores of Lake Orta:

Website Woes and Unauthorised Apps

We had a challenging time in October when we were locked out of the Radio Lingua website as a result of DNS problems. Our hosting company changed the “address system” for our site without any warning, and this resulted in a stressful 48 hour period when no-one could access our site, including us! Fortunately we were back up and running soon afterwards and everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

We’ve also had ongoing challenges with unauthorised apps in the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store. If you’ve downloaded a Coffee Break French, Spanish, German or Italian app to your device, please read this article. We have now been through the same legal process with the App Stores eleven times to remove the apps, but each time the developers simply upload the apps again. Once again, we strongly advise customers not to buy these apps. We hope that 2017 will bring a more permanent solution to this frustrating problem.

Coffee Break Instagram

We launched Instagram accounts for Coffee Break French, German, Spanish and Italian in August. You can now build your vocabulary, practise your verbs and enjoy linguistic inspiration every few days.

Celebrating our 10th birthday

We were delighted to celebrate ten years of delivering language lessons to learners around the world in November and we did so by making no fewer than eleven announcements including new seasons of Coffee Break French, Coffee Break Italian and Coffee Break German, plus a brand new video course, Coffee Break Spanish To Go. We also announced our fifth Coffee Break language: from early 2017 you can start learning Mandarin Chinese with us with the introduction of Coffee Break Chinese. Watch the video below to enjoy a flavour of ten years of Radio Lingua in one minute!

The Coffee Break Academy launches

Our most important development this year has been the launch of the Coffee Break Academy, a new home for our premium courses. Moving forward, all our premium courses will be accessible in the Coffee Break Academy and we’ve been contacting existing members to explain the process of moving your courses to the Academy, should you wish to. There’s more information about that here.

Final episodes of Coffee Break Spanish Season 4

We’re nearing the end of the fourth season of Coffee Break Spanish which has followed the story of María, Rory and Alejandro and their discovery of sunken treasure off the coast of Mallorca. Episode 40 will be published next week, so stay tuned for the final instalment of the story! Premium members should already have access to the extended version of episode 40 in the Academy.

Looking forward to 2017

As we look forward to a new year we’re very excited to be launching our new Coffee Break Italian and German courses, and we’re busy recording the materials and putting together the premium versions of the courses. We’re also hugely excited to be launching Coffee Break Chinese early in 2017 and, of course, Coffee Break French Season 5 will be along later in the year. We plan to continue to develop the Coffee Break Academy, and there are lots more plans afoot for new products and services.

Best wishes for the holiday season!

All that remains is for us to wish you a very happy and peaceful festive season.