I personally enjoyed Absolutely Intercultural podcast. I listened and watched several ones from here, and liked absolutely intercultural 132 episode a lot.
While learning abroad right now, I've thought that language learning is really related with culture of that language. Without knowing the culture, there are lots of chances that I misuse the language. So, I wondered how I could teach my future students language as well as culture. This episode gave me a hint. In addtion, this episode introduced many interesting features like translating animal sound or learning language using games.
I want to let my students hear this episode first and share their thoughts or reflections about this episode. I think many students can get a glimpse of importance of cultural understanding while hearing this episode. After my students realize the necessity of cultural background, then I can give them some assignments as a group to search the cultural differences between Asian countries and English-speaking countries and make the result as a podcast like this episode. Of couse my students' podcast can be about 5~7 minutes and not as long as 20 minutes like this one.
I think I can use this podcast site as a source of developing intercultural knowledge of my students, whenever I find good ones from here.
You are so right that understanding a culture makes a big difference in understanding a language AND its jokes. I couldn't stop laughing over the video clip about translating animal sounds! That was so funny.
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