Audio and video news webcasts by VOA and other foreign government broadcasters

aeflow
 June 25, 2007 at 08:44 PM posted in General Discussion

VOA is a US government-operated radio station which offers news programming in many world languages. Originally broadcast only by shortwave, their material has been available on the Internet for a number of years now.

Their webcasts may be of interest to anyone at the Advanced level.

Unfortunately, you probably can't access these from within China!  But then again, if you're in China, you only have to turn on your TV for an endless source of language-learning material from newscasts.

http://www.voanews.com/english/Webcasts.cfm
(select "Mandarin" from the list and click on "Select Language")

The material is available in RealAudio, Microsoft, or MP3 format.

One benefit of newscasts for language learning (apart from the use of good standard Mandarin pronunciation) is that vocabulary items often tend to be repeated over several days as a particular news story develops, which can be a good way to reinforce learning through repetition.  One drawback is that it's mostly news-related vocabulary, so you'll learn words like "earthquake" and "negotiations" without ever encountering daily-life vocabulary.

There are some other national-government radio newscasts available over the Internet, including Radio Canada International and BBC News

http://www.rcinet.ca/rci/ch/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/chinese/simp/hi/programmes/default.stm

Again, these will not be available from within China, so it's mostly of interest to advanced learners worldwide who don't have access to Mandarin on the radio or on TV.

Profile picture
goulnik
 June 26, 2007 at 07:14 AM

Radio France International (rfi) also has stuff in Chinese (华语) including downloadable news podcasts

Profile picture
guest
 June 26, 2007 at 03:44 AM

Japan's NHK also puts out podcasts of their news updates in a bunch of languages, including Chinese. Good for learning the Chinese pronunciation of important Japanese people's names.

Profile picture
dennism
 June 26, 2007 at 12:31 AM

I was just thinking about asking where to find Chinese VOA broadcasts. A number of years ago before Internet radio, I came across a site with transcripts and audio of VOA broadcasts. Can't find the exact site, but another source is:

http://lost-theory.org/ocrat/voa/

You'll find broadcasts that have transcripts in simplified Chinese. This site points you to the VOA archives which contain transcripts, some with audio or video.

http://www.voanews.com/chinese/archive/index.cfm

The first site also contains links to other sites of interest.