As you’ll be aware we’ve been experiencing some problems with our servers over the past few days. We have been working to resolve these problems as quickly as possible and would like to apologise to the whole Radio Lingua community for the inconvenience over the past few days. It does appear that the site is a bit slower than usual at the moment and we are looking into this. In the meantime please bear with us and if you experience any delays with the site be assured that we’re working on this to try to improve the experience for all of our users.

We will continue to update you over the coming days and hope that everything gets back to normal as soon as possible. You may find it useful to join our Facebook community where we’ll be updating you if there are any further problems with the site. Once again, please accept our apologies for the problems over the past few days, and thank you for your patience.

Update, Friday 20 January

We’ve had some further downtime overnight and are continuing to monitor the site. We’ll leave the site on for the moment, but you may find that some of the pages load more slowly than you expect. Thank you for your patience.

Mark Pentleton
Radio Lingua Director

We’d like to apologise to all users for the server problems we’re experiencing today. We’ve been working to resolve the problems as quickly as possible and will update you when things are back to normal. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience. You can also keep tracks on how things are going via our Radio Lingua Facebook page and via @radiolingua on Twitter.

Our Winter Sale has been running for the past two weeks over the festive period, but it must end today. You can still take advantage of a huge 25% discount on all our courses purchased here on the site.

Until 23:59 this evening you can buy any one of our courses, including Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French, News Time Spanish or Show Time Spanish at a hugely reduced cost. Please use coupon code winter2011 (lower case) on the signup form.

If you’ve previously purchased a membership or product from us, log into your Control Panel and add the relevant product from the drop down menu. Enter winter2011 in the “coupon code” box.

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, or One Minute Languages. When you complete the form, make sure you enter winter2011 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 easter then the 25% discount will be applied and then 20% VAT will be added to the total cost.

Please note that the sale only applies to items purchased directly on the Radio Lingua website through our membership system and is not applicable to products currently available in the iBookstore or Kindle store.

No refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price during this time if the coupon codes have not been used.

*Our server is based in the UK, so “midnight” means midnight GMT. Just to be absolutely clear, our sale ends at:

31st December 2011 – 15:59 / 1 minute to 4pm in San Francisco
31st December 2011 - 16:59 / 1 minute to 5pm in Denver
31st December 2011 - 17:59 / 1 minute to 6pm in Chicago
31st December 2011 - 18:59 / 1 minute to 7pm in New York
31st December 2011 - 20:59 / 1 minute to 9pm in Buenos Aires
31st December 2011 - 23:59 / 1 minute to midnight in Glasgow
1st January 2012 – 00:59 / 1 minute to 1am in Paris
1st January 2012 - 01:59 / 1 minute to 2am in Cape Town
1st January 2012 - 02:59 / 1 minute to 3am in Moscow
1st January 2012 - 06:59 / 1 minute to 7am in Bangkok
1st January 2012 - 07:59 / 1 minute to 8am in Beijing
1st January 2012 - 08:59 / 1 minute to 9am in Tokyo
1st January 2012 - 09:59 / 1 minute to 10am in Sydney

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. Until the next time, happy holidays from everyone here at Radio Lingua!

We’re delighted to announce that early today we delivered our 100,000,000th free language lesson. Since 2006 we’ve been producing language courses delivered by podcast and today we had our 100 millionth download. We offer free audio lessons in 27 languages and these have been topping the charts since we first released Coffee Break Spanish back in 2006.

In addition to the free content available on our site and on iTunes, we also offer premium content and we’re celebrating our 100 millionth download by launching our winter sale. Find out more about how you can save 25% on all our products by reading more about our Winter Sale here.

We’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our listeners from every corner of the world. We hope you’ve enjoyed learning with us. We’d also like to say a special thank you to everyone who has purchased one of our memberships or downloaded one of our premium ebooks on the Kindle Store or the iBookstore. We’re very grateful to you all!

In celebration of our 100 millionth download we’re launching our winter sale today and we’re offering 25% off all of our language courses bought on our site.

Until 23:59 on Saturday 31st December you can buy any one of our courses, including Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French, News Time Spanish or Show Time Spanish at a hugely reduced cost. Please use coupon code winter2011 (lower case) on the signup form.

If you’ve previously purchased a membership or product from us, log into your Control Panel and add the relevant product from the drop down menu. Enter winter2011 in the “coupon code” box.

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, or One Minute Languages. When you complete the form, make sure you enter winter2011 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 easter then the 25% discount will be applied and then 20% VAT will be added to the total cost.

Please note that the sale only applies to items purchased directly on the Radio Lingua website through our membership system and is not applicable to products currently available in the iBookstore or Kindle store.

No refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price during this time if the coupon codes have not been used.

*Our server is based in the UK, so “midnight” means midnight GMT. Just to be absolutely clear, our sale ends at:

31st December 2011 – 15:59 / 1 minute to 4pm in San Francisco
31st December 2011 - 16:59 / 1 minute to 5pm in Denver
31st December 2011 - 17:59 / 1 minute to 6pm in Chicago
31st December 2011 - 18:59 / 1 minute to 7pm in New York
31st December 2011 - 20:59 / 1 minute to 9pm in Buenos Aires
31st December 2011 - 23:59 / 1 minute to midnight in Glasgow
1st January 2012 – 00:59 / 1 minute to 1am in Paris
1st January 2012 - 01:59 / 1 minute to 2am in Cape Town
1st January 2012 - 02:59 / 1 minute to 3am in Moscow
1st January 2012 - 06:59 / 1 minute to 7am in Bangkok
1st January 2012 - 07:59 / 1 minute to 8am in Beijing
1st January 2012 - 08:59 / 1 minute to 9am in Tokyo
1st January 2012 - 09:59 / 1 minute to 10am in Sydney

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. French learners will be very pleased to know that Pierre-Benoît has been wandering about in the streets of Paris again and a second series of Walk, Talk and Learn French is in production. We’re also very excited about the January launch of our new children’s French video course, High Five French. We’ll be releasing more information about all of these projects over the next few months, so stay tuned!

And finally…

Finally, a personal note. Five years ago today, as I uploaded the first lesson of Coffee Break Spanish to the internet I had no idea how things would develop. At the time it was really just a personal project – something to keep me involved in Spanish as my “day job” had changed and I was no longer as closely involved in languages. Since then we’ve seen Radio Lingua grow into a successful company, delivering language lessons to millions of learners from all corners of the globe. I’d like to say a personal thank you to all of the brilliant people involved in the production of our courses, and to everyone involved in the day-to-day running of Radio Lingua. Most of all, I’d like to thank you, the listeners, who find our lessons on iTunes, or who come across our videos on YouTube, or who download our ebooks on your iPhones or iPads. Thank you for continuing to use our lessons, and a special thank you to all of our loyal members. Please continue to enjoy our lessons, and we hope you’re as excited as we are about the new shows we’re launching today.

We love doing what we’re doing and we look forward to the next five years, and hopefully many more!

Mark Pentleton
Director, Radio Lingua Ltd

It is with great sadness this morning that we learn that Steve Jobs has passed away. We don’t usually make comments on the Radio Lingua site about such things, but we felt it was appropriate given that so much of what we do on a daily basis involves Apple products in some way.

Version 4.9 of iTunes was launched in June 2005 and introduced the ability to subscribe to podcasts. It was this new technology and the increasing number of iPods in the hands of learners which inspired us to create our first podcast language course, and in 2006 Coffee Break Spanish was launched on iTunes. Since then we’ve delivered our language lessons to learners’ iPods, iPhones and iPads around the world. Every element of every lesson we produce, from the audio recordings and video content to the graphics and managing the website, is done using Macs.

We’d like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the “visionary and creative genius” behind Apple. Thank you, Steve.

We’re not saying too much yet but 18th October 2011 is going to be an important day for Radio Lingua. We’ll be celebrating our fifth birthday and we’ll be taking that opportunity to announce some new products which we’ve been working on and are ready to release in October, and some other products which we’ve started to work on, but which won’t be available until early 2012.

Until then, make sure you’re signed up to our Twitter feed – @radiolingua and our Facebook page and you’ll be among the first to know what we’re going to be launching on 18th October.

For the past 10 years the European Day of Languages has been celebrated on 26th September. This is an initiative jointly organised by the Council of Europe and the European Union and aims to celebrate linguistic diversity across Europe. Here at Radio Lingua we’ve been offering free language lessons to millions of learners around the world for almost five years. In addition to our free courses we also offer premium courses which feature additional content. To celebrate the European Day of Languages we’ve launched three new courses in the iBookstore: One Minute Italian (Enhanced edition), One Minute German (Enhanced edition) and our brand new French conversation course, Focus on French. We’re also offering 20% off all courses available through our members’  site for two three days only.

[We've had huge amounts of traffic on the site this afternoon and this has resulted in some down time on our server. As a result, we've decided to extend the sale for a further day to allow all customers who wish to take advantage of the special deals the opportunity to do so.]

Until midnight* on Wednesday 28th September you can buy any one of our courses, including Coffee Break Spanish, Coffee Break French, News Time Spanish or Show Time Spanish at a hugely reduced cost. Please use coupon code edl2011 (lower case) on the signup form.

If you’ve previously purchased a membership or product from us, log into your Control Panel and add the relevant product from the drop down menu. Enter edl2011 in the “coupon code” box.

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, or One Minute Languages. When you complete the form, make sure you enter edl2011 in the coupon code area at the bottom of the signup page.

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 easter then the 20% discount will be applied and then 20% VAT will be added to the total cost.

Please note that the sale only applies to items purchased directly on the Radio Lingua website through our membership system and is not applicable to products currently available in the iBookstore or Kindle store.

No refunds will be given on any materials purchased at full price during this time if the coupon codes have not been used.

*Our server is based in the UK, so “midnight” means midnight GMT. Just to be absolutely clear, our sale ends at:

28th September 2011 – 16:00 / 4:00pm in San Francisco
28th September 2011 - 17:00 / 5:00pm in Denver
28th September 2011 - 18:00 / 6:00pm in Chicago
28th September 2011 - 19:00 / 7:00pm in New York
28th September 2011 - 21:00 / 9:00pm in Buenos Aires
28th September 2011 - 00:00 / 12:00 in Glasgow
29th September 2011 - 01:00 / 1:00am in Paris
29th September 2011 - 02:00 / 2:00am in Cape Town
29th September 2011 - 03:00 / 3:00am in Moscow
29th September 2011 - 07:00 / 7:00am in Bangkok
29th September 2011 - 08:00 / 8:00am in Beijing
29th September 2011 - 09:00 / 9:00am in Tokyo
29th September 2011 - 10:00 / 10:00am in Sydney

Salut tout le monde! This is a long overdue update on our Coffee Break French programming. As you will know, Radio Lingua is a small company and over the summer our personal and business travel commitments changed unexpectedly, slowing down the CBF production process. We’re now back “at our desks” and we’re catching up with all of our commitments over the next few days. Coffee Break French episode 327 will be available by the end of the week and subsequent episodes will follow regularly thereafter. We’re looking forward to hearing how Alf, Veronica and Katie spend their remaining weeks in Nice in the forthcoming episodes of Coffee Break French, and hope you are too!

To coincide with our launch of Coffee Break Spanish on the Kindle, we’re giving away a Kindle to one of our Facebook friends. If you’re not already a fan of Coffee Break Spanish on the Kindle, make sure you head over to our Facebook page and “like” us. To enter the competition, all you need to do is post a photo of you enjoying your Coffee Break Spanish lessons – maybe even enjoying a coffee! – on the wall of our Facebook page. Don’t forget to tag yourself, and make sure you tag Coffee Break Spanish too! Just click somewhere on the photo and tag @Coffee Break Spanish – if you’ve already liked CBS on Facebook then you’ll be able to tag the photo.

From the names of everyone who takes part in the competition we’ll pick one random CBS fan as the winner of an Amazon Kindle ebook reader, along with the Coffee Break Spanish ebooks too! Good luck! Find out more about Coffee Break Spanish on the Kindle here.