News for dummies now available in podcast form

I’m probably the only person who uses the “News for dummies” links in the navigation pane on this page, and now I’m going to use them even less. The Swedish news for dummies recently became available in podcast form [RSS], joining the German news for dummies, which has been available as a podcast [RSS] since the beginning of the year. (Both the Swedes and Germans have, of course, other podcast offerings beyond the news for dummies.) Of the two, I prefer the Swedish news for dummies. The German news for dummies is still your standard news report, but spoken m-i-n-d   b-o-g-g-l-i-n-g-l-y   s-l-o-w-l-y. Which means I can hear every syllable clearly without actually understanding anything, since they still use all that fancy German vocabulary. The Swedish news for dummies, on the other hand, proceeds at a methodical (as opposed to mind-numbing) pace and, more importantly, explains the news using simpler words, words which I am much more likely to know.

(What’s the lesson here? I dunno. If you want to speak Swedish with me, talk like those Klartext folks. if you want to speak German with me, do not talk like those folks over at Deutsche Welle’s Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten because I won’t understand you. But your best choice is probably English, since your English will be about twenty times better than my Swedish or German.)