Help finding a french language podcast/cd

either,or

Lately I have been trying to brush up on my French as it has been a few years since I've spoken it at all and I'm considering moving out there for 6 months to a year soon (depending on how much money I can save) to immerse myself in the language and maybe finally become fluent in it. For a really long time I have wanted to become fluent in another language but I have only managed to study it intermittently over the last few years and I have never spent more than a month at a time there so I end up forgetting a lot of what I have learned. At the moment I am going back through all of my old A-level French coursebooks, listening to podcasts and reading books but I am missing something that lets me practice having a conversation. I was wondering if anybody here knows of any podcasts or CDs that I could use that contain half of a conversation (or something equally helpful) so that I could really get up to speed listening and formulating responses quickly. At the moment I'd like to stick to Intermediate level stuff, and ideally it would be cheap (or free). I can't afford to spend a lot of money on something like Fluenz French as it would put me back more than a month in terms of savings.
Thank you H&A.

mysticjuicer

I'm not sure exactly how useful this would be for you, because I'm unsure of what the content is exactly, but if you open iTunes, select podcasts on the top of the screen and look at the right hand navigation bar, you'll see "language learning" as an option. Click that and it'll bring you to a selection window that might contain something to help you out.

Incidentally, as I'm in a similar situation of wanting to brush up on my (now atrocious) french, what french podcasts are you already listening to? I need something to listen to, and ironically, don't want to do the standard "learn how to speak french" thing. I need something where I can just listen to a couple of french speakers talk to eachother, ideally about something of interest to me, while I work. So, what's on your mp3 device at the moment?

ed: Something that's between half an hour and an hour would be perfect. Cheers!

Mom2Kat

try going into itunes and look up the RDC podcasts. That is the french version of CBC radio, so it will be quebec french but may be what you are looking for.

either,or

Thank you, I'll look at both of your suggestions this evening. At the moment I have episodes of Coffee Break French as they are quite dialogue heavy but they are rather short and probably do fall under the standard learn to speak French format. France24 (the news channel) have a really useful free app which lets you stream live news coverage or only watch stories that fall under a certain category of news, so you could select something like sports or technology and it will play all of those stories from that day. I don't know if that's something you'd find useful or not.

Also: The Open University have a series of short (very short) dialogues with transcripts on iTunesU.

mysticjuicer

Thanks for the recs!

Esh

Check out Memrise.com . I use it for upping my vocab in French and it has done wonders. I'm spending a term abroad in Poitiers this Fall as an Applied Linguistics/French major.