Thanks to everyone who responded to our request for feedback on News Time Spanish: it’s always really useful to get feedback on our courses and since News Time Spanish was a bit of an experiment we’re delighted that our listeners have enjoyed the shows.

We’re very pleased to announce that News Time Spanish will be returning this autumn with our regular schedule of news updates from around the world. We’ll be announcing our schedule soon.

In the meantime we’re making the archive of season 1 available for half price – if you’re still interested in accessing some excellent listening materials with full transcripts and exercises then you can purchase the full archive from season 1 (May – July 2010) for just £8.50 GBP. You may also want to check out our Back to School sale to reduce that price even further!

A new school year means a fresh start for language learners of all ages. Why not take up the challenge with Radio Lingua and learn French, Spanish, German, Italian or 17 other languages with our audio courses. While many of our audio lessons are free, they’re just the tip of the iceberg: we offer a huge range of additional materials in audio, video and text form which you can use on your mobile devices and learn on the go, where and when it suits you.

From Wednesday 1st September until Sunday 5th September 2010 at midnight GMT you can use coupon code backtoschool and get 20% off any 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, News Time Spanish, One Minute Languages, or School Run French. When you complete the form, make sure you enter backtoschool in the coupon code area at the bottom of the signup page. Existing members can also benefit from this sale: simply log into your Control Panel, select the product you require and enter the coupon code in the area provided.

Please note that the 20% 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 20% discount will be applied and then 17.5% VAT will be added to the total cost.

Please remember to use the coupon code at the time of purchase: no refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price if the coupon codes have not been used.

Customers should be aware that the coupon code cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer, including the ongoing 30% discount for Radio Lingua Club members. Customers should also note that the coupon code is not applicable to Club Membership which remains at full price throughout this sale period.

With the launch of the World Cup in South Africa, we’re delighted to announce a new addition to our One Minute Languages series. You can now learn the language of 10 million people living in South Africa and other surrounding countries. Zulu is also understood by over 50% of the population of South Africa, and is one of eleven official languages of the country. Zulu is a Bantu language, written using the Latin alphabet, and contains the famous click consonants c, q and x.

Like all our One Minute Languages courses, One Minute Zulu is made up of ten lessons, each lasting just a couple of minutes. If you follow all ten lessons you will be able to communicate with Zulu speakers. Topics covered include greetings, common words, introducing yourself, talking about learning Zulu and language difficulties, numbers, asking people how they are, and other useful phrases.

The course will be made available over the coming weeks, starting with lesson 1 today. All audio lessons are free. To find out how all the words are written, you can access our enhanced podcasts for iPhone/iPod Touch and iTunes, and our lesson guide which features all the words and phrases included in the course. The season pass for all ten lessons is a one-off payment of £5.00 GBP. You can also take advantage of our World Cup sale to get a 20% discount on this price by using coupon code worldcup at checkout. If you already have an account with Radio Lingua, log into your Control Panel and add One Minute Zulu to your membership. If you’re new to Radio Lingua, you can purchase the season pass here.

To celebrate the World Cup we’re launching a fantastic sale: from kick-off at the first match on the 11th June until the final whistle blows at the World Cup Final, we’re offering a 20% discount on all our language courses. Simply use coupon code worldcup at checkout and get 20% off the cost of your season pass for our language courses in French, Spanish, and any one of 17 other languages!

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, News Time Spanish, One Minute Languages, or School Run French. When you complete the form, make sure you enter worldcup in the coupon code area at the bottom of the signup page. Existing members can also benefit from this sale: simply log into your Control Panel, select the product you require and enter the coupon code in the area provided.

Please note that the 20% 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 20% discount will be applied and then 17.5% VAT will be added to the total cost.

Please remember to use the coupon code at the time of purchase: no refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price if the coupon codes have not been used.

Customers should be aware that the coupon code cannot be used in conjunction with any other offer, including the ongoing 30% discount for Radio Lingua Club members. Customers should also note that the coupon code is not applicable to Club Membership which remains at full price throughout this sale period,

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.

We’ve combined our popular One Minute Languages courses into a bundle and are making these available for a hugely reduced price. Each course normally costs £5 (French, Greek, Italian, Japanese and Mandarin are £10 as they include additional bonus items), but we’re offering the entire One Minute Languages library for the reduced price of £37 (+VAT). You can learn the basics of sixteen languages for less than the price of a coffee* per language!

Topics covered include:

• saying hello and goodbye
• basic words including yes, no, please, thank you
• saying your name and asking other people what they’re called
• talking about language – say that you’re learning the language and that you speak a little
• counting 1-10
• asking people how they’re feeling and answering the question yourself
• other common phrases including happy birthday, good luck, I love you

If you’d like to be able to communicate in basic Catalan, Danish, French, Gaelic, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Turkish then click here to take advantage of this offer or view the whole range of One Minute Languages available individually.

*What’s all this about “less than the price of a coffee”?! Well, a Venti Cappuccino in Starbucks in the UK costs £2.65, and we’ve reduced the price of each course to £2.31. Obviously a coffee is priced differently depending on where you purchase it, but we think this is a good deal anyway!

As we mentioned previously, things have been really busy here at Radio Lingua over the past few weeks and there have been a number of things we’ve been meaning to do. We’re now back on track with Coffee Break French – lesson 78 was published yesterday and the remaining two lessons in the series will be published over the next two weeks.

Our discussion forum recently suffered a major spam attack and we’ve had to filter through all the discussion threads and clean up the spam. We’re pleased to announce that the forum is available again and we would invite our community to join the discussions on the forum. We’re also looking for some users who would be willing to be moderators in an attempt to control any future spam attacks. If you would like to take on this role, please contact us and let us know. It would be useful to know your username in our system in case it’s not clear from your email address. Your duties would simply involve keeping an eye open for any spam on the forum and helping to clean up the forum when it’s required. We look forward to hearing from you!

We would like to update all our listeners on our production schedule. We’ve been exceptionally busy over the past few weeks with Radio Lingua Schools work and our on-going publication of Coffee Break Spanish and Coffee Break French has suffered. We have three more episodes of Coffee Break French to record and release before the series comes to an end, and Coffee Break Spanish will continue until episode eighty. We also have a number of outstanding helpdesk issues which we’re working through as quickly as we possibly can.

Apologies to all our listeners in the meantime and we’ll do our best to get back on track in the next few days. We’re recording the remaining Coffee Break French episodes at the weekend and will make episode 78 available soon afterwards.

This weekend we’re offering a 25% discount on our language-learning materials. To receive your 25% discount, simply use the coupon code easter2010 (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 easter2010 in the coupon code area at the bottom of the signup page. Existing members can also benefit from this sale: simply log into your Control Panel, select the product you require and enter the coupon code in the area provided.

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.

Please remember to use the coupon code at the time of purchase: no refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price if the coupon codes have not been used.

The sale starts on Friday 2nd April, and will end at midnight GMT on Monday 5th April. For information, that means:

5th March 2010 – 16:00 / 4:00pm in San Francisco
5th March 2010 - 17:00 / 5:00pm in Denver
5th March 2010 - 18:00 / 6:00pm in Chicago
5th March 2010 - 19:00 / 7:00pm in New York
5th March 2010 - 21:00 / 9:00pm in Buenos Aires
5th March 2010 - 00:00 / 12:00 in Glasgow
6th March 2010 - 01:00 / 1:00am in Paris
6th March 2010 - 02:00 / 2:00am in Cape Town
6th March 2010 - 03:00 / 3:00am in Moscow
6th March 2010 - 07:00 / 7:00am in Bangkok
6th March 2010 - 08:00 / 8:00am in Beijing
6th March 2010 - 09:00 / 9:00am in Tokyo
6th March 2010 - 10:00 / 10:00am in Sydney

We are often asked if we offer coupon codes or discounts on our products. We do offer discounts from time to time, and these are publicised in five main ways:

1. Our Newsletter – we send out an email newsletter every couple of months and there’s always a coupon code in that which will last around one month. The amount varies in each edition, but there is always some kind of coupon code or discount for some or all of our products. To sign up to the newsletter, complete the form in the sidebar of this page with the heading Radio Lingua Newsletter. You’ll need to enter your name and a valid email address and then confirm your subscription by clicking on the link in the email we send you. Please note that we only send out email newsletters every couple of months, so if you don’t receive a newsletter immediately then it’s simply because we’ve not published one!
2. We sometimes announce coupon codes on the News area of our site. You can keep up to date by selecting Radio Lingua News from the drop-down menu on the site, or simply by clicking here.
3. Twitter – follow @radiolingua on Twitter and get access to discounts. These tend to be very random and in the style of “one day specials”. If you’re not using Twitter already you can join on twitter.com.
4. Facebook – we have Facebook pages for Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French and Show Time Spanish and we also do random sales on these pages. Note that you should become a ‘friend’ of the shows on the Facebook pages, not the listener groups which we’re trying to move away from.
5. The Radio Lingua Club – with a payment of £24.00 GBP you become a member of the Radio Lingua Club and in addition to receiving regular language-learning tip podcasts, you also get an automatic discount of 30% on any future purchase within the year membership. For more information about the club, please click here.

Radio Lingua Director Mark Pentleton is in London this week for BETT, the world’s largest educational technology event. Mark has been asked to do a number of workshops and presentations on developing educational resources using Apple’s iLife and iWork applications. In addition Mark will be running workshops at the International Apple Leadership seminar which is taking place alongside BETT. If you’re a teachers in the UK and you happen to be going along to BETT, please go and say hello to Mark on the Apple Education Reseller stand K16.

Mark has made his presentations available in the form of podcasts on his personal blog:

• Creating Revision Podcasts with Keynote and GarageBand
• Making use of free educational content for mobile devices

The Radio Lingua Club is now open for business! We’re launching this in response to requests from listeners and existing premium customers who have been asking for help and advice to take their language-learning to the next stage.

Coaching course – Learning a Language

We’ve been developing a course which provides tips, tricks and tasks to help you make progress more effectively in your language learning. This “Learning a Language” course is an incremental course: when you join the club you receive access to the first lesson, and you’ll receive a new episode every week, coaching you through the process of learning a language. Topics covered in the course include:

• getting started with your language-learning
• useful tools for learning
• tips for learning vocabulary
• strategies for building your confidence in grammar
• choosing – and using – a dictionary
• tasks to help you focus your learning
• advice for learning two languages at once

In addition to these topics we’ll be featuring interviews with language learners and teachers who will share their tips and tricks, and we’ll be giving you some practical tasks to help you plan your learning. The club isn’t just for beginners – there is plenty of advice for those of you who have been learning a language for some time.

That’s not all…

We want our Club Members to feel that they are getting an on-going benefit from membership in addition to the course, so we’re offering reduced prices on all our materials. For the duration of your membership, members will be able to buy all our language courses at a 30% discount. Full details of how to access these special prices can be found within the Club Members’ area on our site.

Refer a friend

If you enjoy Radio Lingua courses, perhaps your friends will too! As a Club Member we’re offering you a 17.5% discount code which you can pass on to your friends. They’ll get 17.5% off the cost of our course, and we’ll refund to you 20% of the total sale! Yes, you could actually earn money by referring lots of your friends to Radio Lingua! There’s more information about this in the Club Members’ area.

What does it cost?

Joining the club costs £24 GBP (+17.5% VAT for EU customers) and this is a one-off payment which provides 12 months of membership. So, if you’re wondering about starting to use our products, you may consider starting by joining our club. You will then be able to purchase any of our products at the reduced prices. Please note that you must join the club first, as you will only get access to the reduced prices once you’re a member.

We will be introducing a pay-monthly version of the club which will cost £3 per month, but we’re not quite ready with the recurring payment system yet. We’ll update this information as soon as the pay-monthly version becomes available.

If you already have an account with us, having purchase another premium course in the past, simply log into your Control Panel and add Radio Lingua Club: 12-month course to your account. If you’re new to Radio Lingua, click the button below to be taken to the purchase page. You can pay with a credit or debit card, or with Paypal or Google Checkout accounts.

Any questions?

As ever, please don’t hesitate to get in touch should you have any further questions about the club. We’ll be happy to provide any further information via our support email system.