Opi suomea! -podcast / Learn Finnish! - Podcast

2020

Lecturers
Students

Arts & Music
Sustainability

Autonomous learning

Finnish

Finnish

A2
B1

Audio
Guiding resources (online course/book)

Vocabulary
Prosody

Listening
Speaking
Reading

Opi suomea! -podcast is a podcast and blog in plain Finnish for intermediate and advanced learners. It consists of twelve podcast episodes. The topics of the episodes vary from general content, such as daily life, hobbies, Finnish traditions and traveling to a more specific issues on language learning, studying, social media, forestry, nature and sustainability, and religion. Every episode has a transcript and episode glossary. The podcast and transcriptions are easily reachable online for both students and lecturers. The material fosters the development of listening, speaking and writing skill. The blog offers for students additional reading materials and links to other useful resources.

This resource was used in the initial stages of a course for intermediate level Finnish language learners as supplementary and review material on a specific topic addressed during the previous course: nature. To meet the main objective, which was to expand the vocabulary on the subject and strengthen the students' listening skills through updated materials, we chose to focus on the episode dedicated to the forest. Following the guidelines, we first read the transcript of the episode and the related lexicon and then listened to some parts of the episode itself. The students adhered very well to the proposed activities, demonstrating a high level of attention, thanks to the pleasant way of presenting current topics. Acquiring new words was very successful with this resource; the repetition of the same concepts with different words by the podcaster proved to be particularly effective. The proposal of a podcast's playful listening challenge, with posters to keep track of what has been learned, also appears very motivating. In addition, the numerous questions posed by the podcaster during the speech give ideas for the further classroom dialogue or writing exercises; this interactive way of presentation proved to be very engaging for the students. The students stated that it is a very useful resource for reviewing and "getting back into the topic" after the summer break. As for the length of the individual episodes, it is perfectly adequate for self-study while it risks being a little excessive (too long episodes) for use in the classroom. In light of this, it can be fruitful to tackle an episode in a guided way during the course and then suggest to students to continue using the resource independently.

Choose a topic of your interest from the podcast site. Intermediate level students may read the transcription and vocabulary first and then listen to the episode. Advanced level students can first listen the episode and then check the comprehension using glossary and transcription.