Podcast 4

Welcome to the fourth episode of RLC’s new podcast. The recordings are pitched at A2 Level (TRKI Basic). This means they should be fairly easily understood by students in one of our intermediate groups, but we hope they will also be accessible to people in some of our higher pre-intermediate groups.

This week’s podcast comprises five news items of about one minute each, and a conversation about Lake Baikal with Lyuda, an RLC teacher who comes from Irkutsk. In addition to the full episode, you can listen to separate audio files for each segment. The recordings can be listened to online or downloaded to your device.

The text is provided in two ways: as a single pdf download, or each segment can be read on this page below by clicking on the title to expand the relevant paragraph.

Most of the unfamiliar vocabulary should be guessable. However, we have included a short list of new words at the end of the pdf, with translations into English. The same words are shown in blue within the text on this webpage, and a simple translation will appear if you hover over the word.

We still encourage you to use the translations as little as possible! The podcast aims to be an informal and informative exposure to spoken Russian; it should also offer you the chance to practise following the gist of the conversation without necessarily understanding every word.

The background music to this week’s podcast comprises extracts from Alexander Scriabin’s Valse, op. 38. The music is performed by Konstantin Semilakovs and reproduced under a creative commons license.

We have kept the feedback form at the bottom of this page: please continue to send us your thoughts if you would like to!