With internet, language translation tools, and text-to-speech (TTS), you can teach yourself some simple foreign languages in easy steps.
First go to google language tools page and select your target translation language. For example, today is Chinese new year's day, and  you want to translate  "Happy Chinese  New Year " into  Chinese.  So you  type the phrase in the text area, select  "English to Chinese (Simplified)", and hit "Translate" button. Google will automatically translate it to "
新年快乐", which luckily is correct! You may want to copy this using "ctrl-c" as we'll use it later.

Now come back to our site, select "Text-to-Speech" from the navigation menu on the left side. Paste the translation into the text area using "ctrl-v", and select "zh", which is Mandarin Chinese, from the drop down language list. Finally click "submit" button, then you'll see "download your audio file here" above the text area. Play the audio file and practice along. Congratulations, you just learned a nice Chinese greeting all by yourself!

The quality of synthetic speech is not perfect, sometimes even sounds quite funny. But it's definitely intelligible assuming you are feeding the TTS engine with simple phrases.

To show you my achievement, I am going to embed the audio in to my blog. To reduce the file size and improve streaming experiences, I'll convert the RIFF wav format into MP3 format. I use an open source software called "Audacity" to do the task. The actual conversion is performed by LAME MP3 encoder (follow the instruction on Audacity's site to download and install LAME for Audacity) .  Due to legal issues related to MP3, ispeakx.com currently doesn't host any MP3 conversion software.

After I open the wav file in Audacity, I go to "File->export", and select MP3 as the format. There are many options for MP3 format, notably "bit rate mode" and "quality". Unlike music whose de facto bit rate is 128 kbps, a much lower bit rate is often  sufficient for speech. Usually 32 kbps (either constant or average bit rate mode) is used, but I am trying to push the limit by choosing "24 kbps" and "average" for bit rate mode, which gives me the smallest file size with acceptable audio quality. You can experiment with it to see what options you think the best.

Finally, I upload the MP3 file along with this blog. Voilà, I just did my first Podcast!