Let's Speak Italian!
The Voice Inside Your Headphones
Although he doesn?t claim to be a linguistic expert, Mike Terry?s podcast, ?Let?s Speak Italian,? offers basic lessons in Italian, a language he picked up seventeen years ago.
How did you end up in Italy? When I was 19 years old (I?m 36 now) I was sent [to Italy] as a missionary for my church. We do a two-year mission and we go all over the globe, and it?s really not our choice where we go. When they do send you overseas to learn a new language they send you to a church college really for about two and a half months where we learn a lot about the language.
I studied French when I was in high school and college, [but] then when you turn in your paper work to go on a church mission trip I had assumed that they would have picked me to go to France or a French speaking [location], maybe Canada or something like that. But then, as soon as I started to learn Italian I really forgot all the French.
Why did you choose podcasting as a way to teach others, rather then just teaching a night school or the like? I?ve been a podcaster for over a year; this is actually my third podcast, so I thought there?s a market out there for people wanting to learn foreign languages. And I said ?well, it?s been a long time since I spoke Italian, but it?d be fun to relearn it? and I could easily teach a beginners course on Italian even though it has been so long. Then I decided that I wanted to find a niche, a podcast where it was going to be a popular podcast because what I envision is being able to make a little bit on money off of podcasting. and so you really need thousands of listeners before anyone wants to advertise on your podcast.
Compared to other podcasts, yours is considered very short. Why did you choose to do it that way? I realized that the average listener to a podcast doesn?t really want to have to get 30 minutes of a language everyday. I did decide that it would have to be an everyday podcast, I thought, you know, five minutes a day, and of that 5 minutes if a couple of that is new material, that would be great.
So I just started doing it, and I had been doing it, just maybe a week or two weeks and iTunes picked it up and put it on their front page under their ?new and notable? podcasts and I immediately went from 500 listeners to 10,000 listeners overnight ? it just went through the roof. Most everything you hear on the ?Let?s Speak Italian? podcast is just me reading, because I want to make sure that we come in on under 5 minutes on the show.
I probably spend maybe an hour a week to come up with the live shows. I could probably do a year of podcasts and not go through one text book. We are moving fairly slowly, in comparison to a collage course, where you would be going though a couple chapters a week, but we?re still a month and a half into this podcast and I think that I?m only in the second chapter, so we are moving slowly, but it doesn?t take that much time to go though it.
Any other message for a bunch of college kids in Texas? You know, I?m a big fan of Texas even though I?ve never been to Texas. I?m a huge Dallas Cowboys fan. In fact, my son (he?s 13) ? his name is Dallas, and, uh, there are quite a few Dallas Cowboy fans outside the state of Texas. Especially in place like Utah here where we don?t have a pro football team here we just adopt someone else?s, so I?ve chosen to adopt the Dallas Cowboys.
To hear Mike Terry, go to: http://letsspeakitalian.libsyn.com/ or find him in iTunes under ?Education?. 
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