Duolingo Podcasts

More About Duolingo Podcasts

So Duolingo actually has four podcasts, and here’s the description Duolingo has for all of their podcasts: improve your language skills and gain new perspectives on the world by listening to easy to follow fascinating, true stories.

The length of each episode is about 20 minutes. And I would make sure to look at the episode description to make sure you’re comfortable listening to it. With littles around this series is ongoing with new episodes available. Weekly. Each podcast comes out on a different weekday. 

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Would you rate and review the friendly podcast guide as a gift to me, for my birthday, the two main places to do that are on apple podcasts and Spotify. It would mean so much to me. If you could give me a positive review, I read every single one and they make my heart so happy.

Introduction to Laura 

I am Laura Macomber and I’m the lead creative producer of podcasts at Duolingo, which is the world’s number one way to learn a language. 

How Duolingo Podcasts Got Started

So we actually have four major podcasts. We started with one and I thought it would be helpful to just quickly run through what we have.

And then I can come tell you about why we started doing this. So We have the Duolingo Spanish podcast and the Duolingo French podcast, which are for learners of French and Spanish. And then we also have two other podcasts for English learners. They’re for native Spanish and Portuguese speakers learning English. The reason we started making these was really to kind of meet a need that learners have and bring high quality storytelling and immersive listening content to a specific target audience of intermediate language learners.

You know, there’s so few opportunities for language learners to engage with really good stories and narratives at a level of language that they understand, you know, there’s content out there for beginners. And then of course you have foreign language media that you can listen to, but those are really designed for native speakers of those languages or really advanced learners of those languages.

So we realized there was this whole intermediate Spot that was missing. Good storytelling and good immersive listening content. So we came up with this format and this podcast Idea that really was meant to hit that intermediate sweet spot. So listeners can hear great stories while practicing their listening comprehension. And we actually work with language scientists to get the language level to a specific place that intermediate learners will understand. 

I think like an example I like to give right now is the hit Netflix show Lupin, which is a French series about this thief and France.

And it’s really fun, but like, if you’re a French learner who’s been using Duolingo for a little while. You’re not gonna just sit down and watch Lupin without the subtitles on. But you can go to our special season of the French podcast that it’s called the rebel thief, and it’s actually inspired by the original Lupin story.

And there’s a version of this out there that is for, you know, intermediate learners and you actually can listen without needing subtitles, maybe without even needing a transcript to read along to. And you can hear a great story and an exciting story.  Also feel like, wow, I actually understand what these people are telling me. And that’s such a confidence building feeling for a language learner. Definitely. 

What to Expect from Duolingo Podcasts

We’re pretty transparent about our mission here. We really want people to improve their language, listening comprehension. That’s the big goal.

But we want them to have fun while they’re doing it. And we also want them to learn about the world. So we hope our podcasts provide the double benefit of teaching you language while also exposing you to the unique cultures behind these languages. You know, think about the Spanish speaking world.

It’s a really full universe. It’s not just one country, one city that you wanna travel to. So we work hard to bring stories from all over the Spanish speaking world, the French speaking world, the English speaking world, and make going beyond like the monuments and big cities. You’ve heard of going to the small towns, the islands, the indigenous communities that also make up this really diverse universe and the real culture, and language learning are our number one goals here. 

The Vibe of Duolingo Podcasts

We’ve definitely been experimenting a bit more with different tones and vibes for our shows. You know, we made a Spanish true crime series.

We produced special episodes about travel and culture. We produced the six part historical fiction series for French learners that I mentioned the Lupin inspired series. So those have been really fun kind of deviations for us, but in general, the majority of our podcast episodes. We feature true stories that center on a person’s real lived experience.

We try to be thought provoking. We always try to be inclusive of a variety of experiences and identities. We also try to be as exciting and suspenseful as possible. We want you to be excited about the content and we want you to stick around to the end. 

Laura’s Favorite Episodes

Well, I’m biased. I love, and I’m proud of everything we produce. I’ll give a shout out to our first serialized season of the Duolingo Spanish podcast, our true crime series, right? So it’s like a true crime show, but it’s for intermediate language learners. 

This one’s called the great Argentine heist, and it’s about an actual bank heist that kind of took Argentina by storm in the early odds. And we had access to the actual thieves and police officers involved in the crime at that time. Yeah, it was amazing. We interviewed them and we had this amazing team of our partners at a Dundee media who went out and collected the narratives and put the audio together and put together this story of what happened the day of the bank heist and kind of the mystery that it plunged the country into for several months and years.

And it all culminated in this exciting courtroom drama. So that was a really special project to work on. I don’t think anyone who thinks about teaching language has ever done anything like this before. So it was a really unique experience on the production side of things. 

And then also our listeners just loved it. We got So much fan mail. People wanted to know what happened next. They were in suspense every week waiting for the next episode to come out. So we were all really proud of that project. And it’s an inspired new projects we have in development actually right now for, for new mini-series and new true crime drama and, and all of that fun stuff.