Learn Persian / Farsi / Dari with Podcasts

Learning Farsi or Dari from podcasts is a bit easier than with Pashto. There are lots of options in a variety of topic areas, so you’re not confined to listening to news broadcasts 24/7. They also cover a broader spectrum of language abilities, so you have more options even if you’re a relative beginner.

(All of them are available on Overcast and iTunes — just search in the ‘add podcast’ section and you’ll find them using the names/titles given below.)

• BBC Persian Radio — This is a BBC news roundup / discussion programme covering whatever is ‘hot’ on any particular day. It’s released every morning.
• Be Ebarat-e Digar — An interview programme from BBC Farsi. They sometimes have non-Farsi speaking guests on the show but everything is dubbed and exists as a complete Farsi experience. Usually pretty interesting. Heavy on the politics, though.
• Chronos — Also an active YouTube channel. This podcast has a large backlist of short episodes. Well worth a listen. Varied themes and content and less formal language used.
• Danestegi — 50 episodes available as an audio podcast feed and since then more recent episodes are available on a Youtube channel. The show is described as covering everything from science-fiction to climate change to extraterrestrial life to psychic readings to crop circles. Conversational style. Would make a nice break from news reports.
• Farsi Readings in Gronigen — Audio from a Persian literature meetup in the Netherlands. Mostly readings from literature / poetry. Higher-level required but good for exposure.
• Khoresth-e Tech — This is a weekly show produced by SBS Persian covering technology and electronics. If you’re at all interested in those topics, this might be a good place for you to get some exposure to how it’s discussed in Persian.
• Learn Persian with Chai and Conversation — This is a podcast for beginners and low-intermediate. Significant parts of the audio are in English, but it’s sometimes nice when going through a poem and explaining all the various implications of a word.
• Pargar — A weekly roundtable discussion in Farsi from the BBC in which guests discuss big topics of relevance to society at large. A tendency towards politics but also cultural issues are discussed.
• Persian News - NHK World Radio Japan — This is a news broadcast in Farsi with an emphasis on stories that affect East Asia. Released daily and short episodes.
• Persian Night Story — This podcast broadcasts translations of stories into Persian. Sometimes they’re originally written in Farsi but the majority are ‘classics’, so Chekhov / Tolstoy or Roald Dahl or Alice Munro etc.
• Persian Podcast — This podcast is geared towards lower intermediate students of Farsi and the host, Hosein Pouriman, offers interviews and lectures and stories. The material is pretty engaging, though there aren’t too many episodes unfortunately and new episodes are irregularly released.
• Radiography Farsi — A podcast (with a limited number of episodes and no longer broadcasting) in which the host discusses famous photographs from the history of world photography.
• Samaak Audio Mag — This fortnightly podcast offers discussions of literature in Farsi, particularly poetry. Worth subscribing if you’re into Persian literature.
• SBS Dari — A news broadcast in Dari, with an emphasis on stories relating to Afghans in Australia.
• SBS Persian — A news broadcast in Dari, with an emphasis on stories relating to Iranians or Persian-speakers in Australia.
• Shir Khat Persian Blockchain Podcast — This is a podcast in which the host discusses and introduces various aspects of blockchain in Persian. It’s very technical and very in depth (and seems to have been discontinued) but if this is your thing, then there’s lots of material to dig into.

Learn Pashto with Podcasts

It’s been several years since I’ve actively studied Pashto. I’m returning to a somewhat stale vocabulary base. In these cases, listening is one of the more useful ways to reactivate words I once knew, or to learn new words from scratch in context. Podcasts are usually a really useful way to get that active language practice. For most big languages you’re usually spoiled for choice (think French, Mandarin, or even Arabic) but Pashto has fewer options despite around 50 million people speaking it worldwide (source for estimates here and here).

Hardly any of these are directly available via a search on a good podcast client like Overcast so you’ll have to manually add whatever you like via the RSS feed.

There are a few options that I’ve managed to find so for the few souls who are also looking, perhaps this might be useful:

• CELCAR Pashto Language Learning Podcasts (RSS)

This is no longer updated but you can find a bunch of audio excerpts read out. They’re intended as language study materials so they’re a bit more user-friendly for the intermediate language learner.

• SBS Pashto

This is an Australian broadcaster that offers news and cultural reports regularly in podcast format. You can find it on Overcast by searching for ‘SBS Pashto’. Episodes are sometimes very local (i.e. tailored to Australian news) but it’s a regular source of input nonetheless.

• Voice of America Pashto Evening News

This podcast / broadcast is released in the evening (Afghan time) every day. Episodes last 30 minutes and are made up of various small news reports and sometimes interviews. It’s a good way to stay up to date with the news and also keep your formal media Pashto up to scratch. The reports and stories are usually pretty interesting and engagingly told.

• Da Pulay Poray Drama

This is a serialised drama produced by PACT Radio out of Jalalabad. Unfortunately they don’t offer episodes in RSS format so you are forced to either visit them at their Facebook page (ugh) or their own website and manually click to listen. The quality of the material and storytelling is excellent, however, so I usually try to listen in despite the shortcomings in the delivery method.

• RFE/RL Azadi Radio (RSS)

Radio Freedom - Radio Liberty offers a wide variety of their programmes for subscription as podcasts (via RSS). Some are more regularly updated than others but this is a useful and interesting set of materials to complement VOA’s more straightforward news broadcasts.

I will update this page as and when I discover more. One of the big missing pieces is BBC Pashto. I can’t seem to find any of their broadcasts / materials online in a subscribable format.

Three Podcast Recommendations

I've been walking around more this past week, and have added some new listening material into my podcast quiver. So if you're interested in something outside your usual information diet, give these three a try:

• Slate's Stranger Than Fiction. Conversations with science-fiction authors about the intersection of their writing with technology and the contemporary world. This podcast is no longer produced and there are only 6 episodes (dating back to 2013).
• Pod Save the World. Conversations with people who were involved in American foreign policy decisions. This is part of a series of new podcasts put out by some former Obama-government staff members (aka Crooked Media). The foreign policy discussions are often interesting and they offer behind-the-scenes glimpses of how certain deals were made. So far we've heard about the Cuba and Iran deals made under Obama.
• Arms Control Wonk. A discussion podcast about nuclear weapons. It's a fairly opinionated glance at some pretty down-in-the-weeds topics relating to nuclear security, particularly from the US perspective, but given that North Korean nuclear weapons are likely to be a big deal in 2017 this is a useful one to follow.

10 podcasts to learn about data science and programming

When learning a new skill or indulging a new interest, I like to find out who is podcasting about that thing. I do this early on in the process since it is hard to get a sense of the full landscape of a particular skill or issue without reading widely. The internet, of course, is a great way to find out about all the different nooks and crannies of a particular community. That doesn't help me much when I'm cooking, though, or when I'm walking in town. Podcasts are an opportunity to broaden my exposure to those topics while doing something else, usually something physical.

Here are some of my favourite podcasts relating to data science and programming:

Becoming a Data Science Podcast

Hosted by Renee Teate, this was my first exposure to smart data professionals talking about their work. I think the podcast is meant to be modelled on the book Data Scientists at Work. (I've read the book and thoroughly enjoyed it, for much the same reasons as I enjoyed this podcast). I'd recommend going back to the first episode and listening to them all. You can get a good overview from listening to just these episodes. Renee has recently resumed podcasting for season two and she also runs a data-science resource online empire that is filled with useful materials.

CodeNewbie

I'm working my way through all of these these, listening through from the very beginning (over 120 of them). At the beginning, I find it's useful to hear from people who started from nothing and who found a way to use code in their life or career. Not all of the guests are equally interesting, but the podcast is well produced and there's still loads of useful information buried in the overall corpus.

Learn to Code With Me

This podcast is in its second season. Just like CodeNewbie, the podcasts tend to focus on the journeys of people who have started from nothing. The guests are variable in terms of how interesting I find them, but I enjoy it nonetheless.

Partially Derivative

This is one of the more popular data science podcasts out there at the moment. Episodes range from discussion panels to interviews to deep-dives on a particular topic. This is great for keeping up with the buzz or gossip in the data science world and they often have pretty senior guests from the world of data science and business.

Start Here: Web Development

This podcast also has a Ruby/Rails sidekick podcast. I've just started the Web Development series and am finding it a useful overview. I'm not coming at this all as a complete beginner, so I'm not sure of the extent to which it'd be useful if that's you, but each episode covers a particular area of programming and web development. Episodes end with an assignment or set of tasks to do to practice or learn whatever they were discussing. This is a nice combination of approaches and as a quick revision of some web development fundamentals, this is a really good place to start.

Talk Python To Me

Python is the language that I've studied and coded most with, so this podcast allows me some contact with people who are light-years ahead of me in terms of their skills. It also introduces frameworks and personalities that are important within the Python community, so if Python's your thing, this is probably a useful podcast to listen to.

Data Skeptic

The contents of this podcast fairly frequently go right over my head, but it's good to be exposed to the ideas being discussed. There are interviews with people about particular issues and mini-dives explaining a particular data science feature or area.

Full Stack Radio

This is less content-rich than some of the other podcasts listed in the list, and there's sometimes too much focus on the marketing/business side of things, but it's nevertheless an enjoyable set of discussions about web development and programming in general. Guests often speak about meta-issues relating to productivity, management and so on.

Greater Than Code

This is one of my favourites. It's quite a new podcast, with only 14 episodes as of writing, but the hosts take care to bring in a diverse range of guests. In particular, it's a breath of fresh air to have lots of female coders on, since most of the 'successful' coding podcasts tend to be heavily dominated by men and their male guests.

O'Reilly Data Show

This podcast includes a lot of the latest technologies, big trends and big-name guests. Some episodes are too vague and unspecific, but as a big name in the data science podcast crowd, this is a fairly good place to go for the orthodoxy of many institutions and individuals involved in the space.

Please let me know if I'm missing any good podcasts that would be appropriate for someone at the beginning end of their programming journey.

Music, Sound & Technology

Steven Johnson, the author of the fantastic book Where Good Ideas Come From, has been releasing podcasts episodes in advance of the publication of a new book. Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World seems to cover the relationship between innovation and 'play', ideas he has worked to explore in previous books. The podcast series offers a preview of these ideas, engagingly produced and narrated through a series of vignettes and smaller stories.

Episode 3 ("Strange Loops and Circuit Benders (Or, How New Music Comes from Broken Machines)") was an exploration of sound, how our sound universe has been changing alongside technological developments and cultural evolution. Johnson talks to Alex Ross (of The Rest is Noise fame) about how new sounds started to enter into the sonic vocabulary of musicians and creators. The other episodes are interesting, too. If you're interested in music and/or technology, you might want to check this one out.

Walking with Words

Earlier this year I glanced at my Fitbit stats and saw that I was walking less than usual. There were some reasons for this, but as always, the data itself functioned as a sort of reminder, a nudge in the right direction. I had a think about the main thing keeping me from writing and realised it was because I was working full-out writing my PhD.

Most of the second (rewrite)/redraft of my thesis was written in a little coffee shop in Delft (a small historic town in the south of Holland). Each morning I'd cycle to the cafe at 7:30, ready to start at 8am. I'd work for four hours and then cycle back home at 12. I'll write more about this particular workflow/pattern in a separate post, but suffice it for now to say that I had lots of time in the afternoons when I could be walking or finding more ways to be moving my body, but this wasn't happening.

When I tried to remedy this by going for more walks in the afternoon, I found I developed a strong antipathy to the time outdoors. It shouldn't have been that way. I was in the middle of nature, walking through nature preserves and forests close to home, but that apparently wasn't enough.

Podcasts and audiobooks offered a way through and round this problem. I took a bit of time to explore some different shows with regularly published episodes and I filled up my Audible queue with interesting books that I wouldn't otherwise read. It turns out that this was enough. (I feel like I've learnt this lesson in the past, albeit in slightly different circumstances. I guess some lessons don't stick as well.)

In case you're curious, four podcasts I still enjoy are:
1) The Frontline Club -- recordings of their live events in London. The quality is variable, but generally you learn something about a place or an issue that you hadn't considered (either ever, or for a very long while). Time well spent.
2) Invisibilia -- the first series was far better than the current one, but they're still almost always interesting and stimulating. The hosts discuss various aspects of psychology, behaviour and social activity.
3) Back to Work -- This might only make sense if you've been listening from the beginning, but Merlin Mann and co-host Dan Benjamin are an interesting pair to discuss technology, its role in our lives and a huge number of various connected issues.
4) Reveal -- this is connected with The Center for Investigative Reporting and each episode offers audio versions or discussions of major investigative reporting. Like with the Frontline Club, you learn a lot from this one. It's a little US-centric, but not exclusively so.

For Audible books, the sky is the limit. I listen to books at 1.25 or sometimes 1.5x speed (and podcasts at 1.5-2x speed), so even very long books can only take 12 or 13 hours to get through. That's one or two weeks of walks for a book you wouldn't otherwise have read. Get through a book or two every two weeks and you're reading a couple of dozen books a year.

Now when I think about whether I want to go for a walk, I am enthusiastic about going out. I'm happy not only to be moving, but also to be coming into content designed to inform and entertain. If you aren't moving as much as you feel like you might want, maybe see if you can add in some audio media to make the activity more pleasant.