Well, I feel rather dumb now…
I’ve been listening to podcasts from Deutsche Welle for a while now. They offer quite a few, and some of them are made specifically for learners of German. A couple that I’ve listened to for quite a while via iTunes is “Alltagsdeutsch” and “Sprachbar.”
The podcasts have a transcript of the entire show in the Description area in iTunes, or they’re supposed to anyway. Due to the amount of text that Deutsche Welle tries to get into the field, it always gets cut off by quite a bit. Furthermore, I don’t know if any of you have ever tried to read a transcript for a 20 minute long podcast on the iPod’s tiny screen, but it isn’t particularly enjoyable.
Of course, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble if I’d snooped around on their website some more. Apparently, they have pages for all of their podcasts. Guess what’s on all of those pages? Yep – transcripts of all of the podcasts, in nice, large text, far more readable than the iPod screen.
Here is the page for Alltagsdeutsch, and here is the page for Sprachbar. Here is the main page for their podcasts, if you want to browse around for others.
They do the transcripts for free? That’s great! Other people usually give away the podcasts but charge the transcripts.
Yep, it appears so. And yes, it’s pretty cool of them to do so.