Afrikaans

Blog Category
By Nick Afrikaans

The 7 Best Podcasts to Learn Afrikaans in 2021

If you’re planning to travel to or work in multiple countries in Africa, it can be helpful to learn Afrikaans, a southern African language that is also the official language of South Africa.

The language stemmed from the Dutch spoken by settlers in the 1600s and has evolved over time into what we see and hear today. Now, Afrikaans is spoken in not only South Africa, but also Namibia and in parts of Botswana and Zimbabwe. There are more than 7 million people who speak Afrikaans as their main language, and another 10 million-plus people who speak Afrikaans as their second language.

Are you interested in learning Afrikaans? If you’re taking an in-person or online course to learn Afrikaans, then you may be looking for language-learning resources to help you along this journey. If that’s the case, then you’ve come to the right place.

Language-learning podcasts can be an excellent complement to any online or in-person language course, helping you stay abreast of vocabulary and grammatical concepts and further your comprehension skills. (And if you’re looking for additional tools, such as courses, YouTube channels, books, and movies, we recommend checking out our roundup of ways to teach yourself Afrikaans.)

Check out these seven recommended Afrikaans podcasts and see if one – or a few! – might be right for you.

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By Tara English Afrikaans Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Finnish French German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Spanish Swedish Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese

Mondly

Quick Review

2.7 

Summary:

Mondly is a language-learning app that teaches basic vocabulary and grammar structures. It seems most appropriate for learners with little to no exposure to their target language.

The activities mostly rely on passive recognition of vocabulary and phrases, and therefore are not very challenging. However, they are varied enough that you probably wouldn’t get bored with short, daily practice sessions.

Although I wouldn’t recommend Mondly to anyone looking to seriously learn a language, it may be appropriate for individuals studying languages with less available resources, or for individuals who are preparing to travel abroad.

Quality

Both the interface and the course itself could be designed better.

Thoroughness

It’s decent for learning vocabulary, but I thought a lot of the material wasn’t explained very well.

Value

It’s fairly inexpensive.

Price

There are three plans…
$9.99 per month for one language
$47.99 per year ($4/mo) for one language
$47.99 per year ($4/mo) for all languages

Strangely, I was able to access multiple languages even though I only signed up for one month at $9.99.

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By Tanya Afrikaans Chewa (Chichewa) Dinka Ewe Fon (Fon gbè) Fulah Ga Gikuyu Haitian Creole Hausa Hebrew Igbo Kanuri Kinyarwanda Kirundi Luganda Luo Maasai Malagasy Nambya Nigerian Pidgin Persian Sena Somali Sotho Swahili Swazi Tigrinya Tongan Tsonga (Xitsonga) Tswana Venda Xhosa Yoruba Zarma Zulu

African Storybook

4.5 
Price: Free

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Struggling to find beginner-level Afrikaans or Yoruba reading materials? Spanish books relevant to Equatorial Guinea instead of Spain or Colombia? Stories in Nigerian Pidgin or Cape Verdean Creole?

African Storybook has thousands of free-to-read children’s stories in various African languages, from Acholi through to Zinza. Most of them were written by African authors.

The website is best for beginner and lower-intermediate students. The stories are generally designed for young children, with easy-to-read sentences that introduce you to basic vocabulary and some variation in tenses. The difficulty is graded from one to five, with five being the most challenging. You can normally find the English translation of the book, too, although you would probably be better off using a dictionary.

Don’t give up if at first you don’t see your language on the website. Some languages have been entered with their English name, others with their original name, and others under several different names. For example, for Swahili, you would need to look under “Kiswahili”, while French texts are under “French”.

Frustratingly, not all languages on the dropdown menu currently have texts. According to African Storybook, they have a greater number of books for languages in Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa. However, as this initiative continues to grow, hopefully they’ll have stories for more and more languages.

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By Tanya Afrikaans Arabic Bengali Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Croatian Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Igbo Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean Latin Malay Malayalam Mandarin Chinese Marathi Mongolian Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Serbian Shona Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Vietnamese Xhosa Yoruba Zulu

AmazingTalker

2.5 
Price: From around $10 per 50-minute class

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AmazingTalker is an italki and Verbling competitor that lets you book classes with language teachers and academic tutors of your choice. It has a lot of attractive features for students, but teachers complain about high commission rates and lack of support.

It boasts a 3% acceptance rate for teachers and a 100% satisfaction guarantee. If you’re not happy with your class, they’ll rebook you another one for free. There are lots of teachers to choose from, or you can also use their AI Matching Service to find a tutor. The teachers’ profiles include videos, reviews, and their résumé.

However, AmazingTalker doesn’t seem a great choice for teachers. It charges English and Japanese teachers astonishingly high commission rates of up to 30%. While these rates fall as teachers earn more through the site, they have to make $1,500 a month before the commission reaches levels comparable to italki and Verbling. Making it worse, there’s an additional 8% fee for payment processing and tax that all teachers have to pay, no matter what language they teach. 

There have also been complaints on Reddit from teachers claiming to have been harassed by students and fellow teachers. However, we cannot corroborate these.

Given all this, we’d recommend trying italki (review) or Verbling (review) first. Alternatively, check out our guide to the best platforms for online language classes.

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By Tanya Arabic Afrikaans Albanian Armenian Bulgarian Cantonese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Filipino Finnish French German Greek Haitian Creole Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latin Lithuanian Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Ojibwe Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Twi Ukrainian Vietnamese

Verbling

Quick Review

4.6 

Summary:

Verbling is an online language-class marketplace where you can take lessons with teachers of your choice. It has some student-friendly extra features, including a built-in online classroom, flashcards, homework calendar, and a filing system for lesson materials. There are also useful but disorganized forums where you can discuss languages, share writing for critique, and do free language drills and exercises.

The lessons are generally high quality and well structured, plus the filters make it easy to find teachers who specialize in everything from accent reduction to interview preparation. 

However, it can be slightly pricier than alternatives, so if you’re on a tight budget, you may want to look elsewhere. It also has fewer languages than some of the bigger competitors, so it might not be a good choice if you want to study Azerbaijani, Khmer, or Yoruba.

Teacher Quality 

There are some less experienced teachers, but I found the lessons to be more consistently high quality than on italki.

Platform 

The classroom technology, flashcards, and filing system are fantastic for learners and easy to use.

Value

Some teachers charge more than on italki, but you get better classroom technology, more privacy, and fewer disorganized teachers.

Languages

Verbling lists 65 different languages on their platform, from Spanish and Mandarin Chinese through to Twi and Berber. Not all of them have available teachers, however.

Price

Prices are set by the teacher and range from $5 to $75 for an hour-long lesson. You can get discounts for buying packs of 5, 10, or 20 lessons with a teacher. Every student gets one free trial lesson, after which they’re $6 each.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Bavarian Belarusian Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Galician Mandarin Chinese Turkish

Glosbe Dictionary

3.5 
Price: Free

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Glosbe is a dictionary that serves over 6000 languages. Most words have a list of definitions, conjugations, declensions, and similar phrases (although these phrases are hit or miss when it comes to how relevant they are to the initial entry). Many of the entries are created by community members, who can add and edit translations, example sentences, pronunciations, and images. Also, the site does not use text-to-voice pronunciation — as a result, some words may not have any pronunciation.

It’s important to note that some of the content is not checked by the creators, such as the example sentences. Be careful if you are trying to learn new phrases from these lists, as although many of them are correct, there are a few that may lead you to learn inaccurate vocabulary or grammar. Additionally, less commonly studied languages may be listed as available, but only contain a few lines of content.

Overall, Glosbe may be a helpful tool if you can’t find dictionaries that specialize in your target language. However, SpanishDict is a far more comprehensive option for Spanish learners, as is Pleco for Chinese learners and Kanji Study for Japanese. You can also check out Forvo, a dictionary resource for native speaker audio files that has strict rules on community contributions.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Azerbaijani Basque Belarusian Bengali Burmese Catalan Cebuano Chewa (Chichewa) Corsican Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Gujarati Haitian Creole Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hmong Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Kinyarwanda Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Mandarin Chinese Maori Marathi Mongolian Nepali Norwegian Odia Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Romanian Russian Samoan Scots Serbian Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

My Language Exchange

4.2 
Price: Freemium, Gold Memberships start at $6/mo

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My Language Exchange has been growing since 2000. Although the website seems out of date, it still has an active community of millions of language-learners who speak almost 200 native languages (including less commonly studied languages).

You can choose a pen pal by reading their bios, or there is a chat room available for you to instantly connect with a language exchange partner — note that if you create a Gold account, you can initiate chats with other users, but as a regular user, you will have to wait to be contacted.

Using the Cormier Method, the website provides tools to help intermediate speakers effectively practice with other learners. It advertises a Chat Companion with lesson plans to accompany your exchange, or lesson plans developed by teachers (although the quality of these resources varies drastically). 

You can also find language teachers on the site, but given that the transactions take place directly between you and the teacher, you may feel safer using a 3rd party platform like italki or Verbling. 

Although there are outlines on how to participate in language exchanges, how these outlines are followed depends entirely on you and your partner(s). My Language Exchange will help you build connections with other learners, but it’s up to you to plan how to practice. The concepts can also be used with any language exchange platform, such as Lingbe, italki, Tandem, and Amikumu.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Austrian German Azerbaijani Basque Bavarian Bengali Bislama Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Chechen Cherokee Coptic Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch English Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Frisian Georgian German Greek Gujarati Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Ingush Irish Italian Japanese Javanese Kannada Kazakh Khmer (Cambodian) Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malay Malayalam Maltese Manx Maori Marathi Mongolian Nahuatl Nepali Norwegian Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Sanskrit Scots Scottish Serbian Sherpa Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Swahili Swedish Syriac Tajik Tamil Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Turkish Turkmen Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Yiddish Yoruba Yucatec Maya Zulu

lexilogos

3.5 
Price: Free

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Although Lexilogos seems to have entirely neglected its aesthetics, it holds more than meets the eye. If you click on one of the 130+ languages listed at the bottom of the page, you will find a series of resources to support your studies. This is especially useful for less-studied languages, like Marathi, Basque, and Pashto. Although the lists don’t provide recommendations for applications, they do provide a list of dictionaries, keyboards, news sites, books, and research papers. Additionally, if you switch to the French version of the site, there are even more languages and resources available for you to explore.

Within each language’s page, there is also a dictionary search function. You will notice that more commonly studied languages will have dozens of dictionaries to choose from, while less commonly studied languages may only have one or two.

Overall, Lexilogos is a great option for finding resources for less commonly studied languages. They regularly update their site, so make sure to check back if you don’t find what you’re looking for the first time around.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Armenian Aymara Azerbaijani Bambara (Bamanankan) Belarusian Bengali Bislama Bosnian Breton Bulgarian Burmese Cantonese Catalan Cebuano Chechen Chewa (Chichewa) Coptic Cornish Cree Croatian Czech Danish Dari Dutch Dzongkha English Esperanto Estonian Ewe Faroese Filipino Finnish French Frisian Galician Georgian German Greek Greenlandic Guarani Gujarati Haitian Creole Hakka Hausa Hawaiian Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Igbo Indonesian Inuktitut Irish Italian Jamaican Creole Japanese Javanese Kannada Kanuri Kazakh Kirundi Korean Kurdish Kyrgyz Lao Latin Latvian Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Malagasy Malayalam Maltese Mandarin Chinese Manx Maori Marathi Marshallese Mongolian Navajo (Diné bizaad) Nepali Norwegian Occitan Oromo Papiamento Pashto Persian Polish Portuguese Punjabi Quechua Romanian Romansch Russian Samoan Sanskrit Sardinian Scottish Serbian Shona Sindhi Sinhala Slovak Slovenian Somali Spanish Sundanese Swahili Swedish Tajik Tamil Tatar Telugu Thai Tibetan Tigrinya Tongan Tsonga (Xitsonga) Tswana Turkish Turkmen Twi Ukrainian Urdu Uyghur Uzbek Venda Vietnamese Welsh Wolof Xhosa Yiddish Yoruba Zulu

Master Any Language

0.2 
Price: Free

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Master Any Language has a counterintuitive interface with activities that are frustrating to navigate. Its only perk is that it supports less-studied languages, but even if you do find yourself lacking resources in your target language, this website will probably detract from your learning. You will jump through hoops trying to find the audio recordings by native speakers, so you may want to try ilovelanguages or Learn101 instead; they have low ratings, but they won’t make you lose your motivation to learn altogether.

Most of the activities on Master Any Language are matching games that require you to click on two identical characters, words, or letters: the purpose of this is unclear because it tests neither recall nor recognition. Another activity asks you to form or match nonsensical sequences of words (Ex. Find the sentence identical to “el el el el tchèque tchèque tchèque el el tchèque tchèque”….).

Ultimately, you would probably be better off trying to decipher a page of text with absolutely no guidance than to even attempt to wrap your head around MAL’s activities.

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By Tara Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Bulgarian Cantonese Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Esperanto Estonian Faroese Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hakka Hausa Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Igbo Indonesian Irish Italian Jamaican Creole Japanese Korean Kurdish Latin Lithuanian Luxembourgish Macedonian Mandarin Chinese Norwegian Occitan Papiamento Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Sanskrit Serbian Shona Slovak Spanish Swahili Swedish Tamil Thai Tibetan Turkish Ukrainian Urdu Welsh Wolof Yiddish

Verbix

2.3 
Price: Free

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Verbix is a verb conjugator website and app developed by an independent non-profit organization. It conjugates over 100 languages, including Old English, Latin, and Yiddish

The amount of information on the conjugation page varies depending on how common the language is. At its best, it will display nominal forms, most common verb conjugations, verbs that have similar conjugations, translations, synonyms, antonyms, cognates, and a section on etymology. Sometimes there are sample sentences (without translations) that seem to come from articles and books. The final section on additional information seems a bit random, and its purpose is unclear.

To conjugate a verb in another language, you have to know the verb in its infinitive form. Unfortunately, although Verbix has a translation function, it doesn’t seem to cover all of the available languages, so you may not be able to find the verb you are looking for in the first place.

A fun page to explore is Verbix’s list of over 6000 languages with a map depicting where each of these languages is spoken. Otherwise, Verbix seems a bit random and incomplete. It may be a helpful resource for less commonly studied languages, but check out Reverso Translation, Cooljugator, and SpanishDict first. 

Also, if you want to practice verb conjugations in Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Latin, check out Conjuguemos

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