Deutsch - Warum Nicht? vs. Radio D when learning German

Over on Deutsche Welle you can find a great deal of online courses to learn the language, but there are only two that you can use to learn another language at the same time:

• Deutsch - warum nicht? (German - why not?) and
• Radio D

The reason for that is that these two courses have been made in other languages besides English, so for those learning another language that have some interest in German as well will be able to use that language instead of English to pick up German as well. The other courses on Deutsche Welle are either all in German or only have explanations in English.

I spent five months last year for example going over all the lessons on DWN in Turkish - since it's made for Turks that means that in the beginning it's about 98% Turkish and 2% German when still at the basic level (for example lesson 3 is just about Hallo Taxi), but near the end it's a bit closer to 50/50. That's a total of 104 lessons though by then so there's lots of time to get used to it.

First a short caveat: Content-wise, DWM is a million times more interesting than RD. DWM is about a university student and hotel frontman (Portier) named Andreas that works in a city called Aachen near the border with Belgium, who has an invisible friend named Ex (kind of like a female sprite). The story is really interesting even during the first few lessons when the German's really simple, and there are a lot of events at the hotel like a musician that doesn't always pay the bill on time, a doctor (who later becomes one of the main characters) that visits from Berlin every once in a while, a married couple that clearly hates each other, and so on. Near the end Andreas and Ex and the rest get to leave Aachen and see all sorts of other areas in Germany, and in addition to that the music is very good, and the atmosphere of the whole course is great.

In comparison, RD is trash. So far there are only 26 lessons (and I think they're making more) but the content is completely random; they start introducing various German dialects before they even get to dealing with past tense, there are other characters from Spain, Italy and so on that mix in their native language with the German they use which is annoying for me and probably confusing for people that can't tell which part is supposed to be German and which is Italian, Spanish or whatever. The story itself is really boring too, and the characters are annoying. The worst one is a computer called Compu that speaks in a really annoying robotic voice and beeps every time he finishes a sentence. *BEEP* *BEEP* (oldschool dot matrix printer sound) *Achtung* *König* *Ludwig* *lebt*. *Mysteriöse* - *sehr* *mysteriöse* - *BEEP* - *BEEP* *BEEP* - blech.

So what's RD good for? Well, it's worth using for one reason: the pdfs have everything written out, so when first learning another language it's quite good. With DWN you're on your own; there are pdfs but they only offer a general guideline as to what the lesson is about but in RD absolutely everything is written out in both languages, so if you're a beginner you'll still be able to follow along. Even with all that though the story is annoying enough that you might want to skip the first ten lessons or so in order to get to the part of the story that is at least a tiny bit interesting. Around lesson 20 or so it becomes bearable and Compu doesn't say so much anymore.

There are a ton of languages that these two language courses are available in, from the ones you'd expect to find like French, Spanish and Russian, and all the way to Bulgarian, Romanian, Indonesian, Urdu, and so on. Check the site for the complete list. Radio D is a lot newer and as of March 2008 a few languages (like Romanian) have recorded mp3s but the pdfs are still written in English. I waited for a while before the Turkish edition was finished a few months ago, for example. For a while they had only recorded a single mp3 and no pdf, and then a few weeks later all of a sudden they had everything.

So, in short:

• Use DWN if you're at all good in the language you want to learn along with German or can't stand annoying characters in a story;

• Use RD when first learning a language and you need to have everything written out for the time being.