What's a good place to hear various languages spoken?

[brandrinn]

If I want to hear what, say, Mongolian sounds like, or Latvian, or Xhosa, it's not easy for me to find audio samples. Searching youtube usually returns lots of songs or language lessons mostly in English, but that's no good. I want just natural speech, as if I were eavesdropping. There was once a website that directed you to countless European radio stations, but it doesn't work anymore. Where do you all go for audio samples?

[Astraios]

Search harder on Youtube, there's plenty of amateur videos with just talking. Or Google "[language] online radio" or something.

[Whimemsz]

Mongolian
Latvian
Xhosa

[Xephyr]

Here's an audio of a rather-lengthly story (two, actually) in Klallam.

[Radagast revived]

I hear New York City is a good place for that.

[brandrinn]

Whimemz: I was just picking random languages, but thanks for the effort. One of those sites was the Euro radio site I mentioned that is now defunct. Same with Tunein. But the south African station, I'm assuming you found with a google search? I'll keep trying.

And as for Youtube, I don't know what you mean Astraios by "search harder." There certainly aren't a lot of videos with "just talking." When you search for a language, it's 30% songs, 40% language lessons on elementary phrases, and 30% things that aren't relevant to the search. The only time I ever find a video on youtube that has just talking, it's an American high school kid vlogging about it with an atrocious accent.

[clawgrip]

Another good possibility: find out the name of the country/the president/king/some famous person (not a singer)/religion/food/etc. in the language you wish to study, including the native orthography. Search for that on youtube. You can probably find news stories or something in that language about that person or thing. The rarer the language, the more important/famous the thing/person you'll need to search for.

[Vuvuzela]

For Canadian Aboriginal languages, there's this

[sucaeyl]

Omniglot has short recordings for quite a few languages. Global Recordings Network is a religious site that has thousands of recordings of biblical stories in an impressive variety of languages. None of the recordings are conversational per se, but they aren't songs, lessons or video-blogs, either.

[hwhatting]

Another good possibility: find out the name of the country/the president/king/some famous person (not a singer)/religion/food/etc. in the language you wish to study, including the native orthography. Search for that on youtube. You can probably find news stories or something in that language about that person or thing. The rarer the language, the more important/famous the thing/person you'll need to search for.

I second that. People who post their own nattering or excerpts from films or TV shows on youtube normally don't put a "language X" tag on them, so to find them, you need to look for terms (names of celebrities, tv / radio programs, films, political or cultural topics) from that specific language / culture.