🇮🇩 The best podcasts for learning Indonesian

Innovative Language's Indonesian arm is the largest organised body of dialogue-based audio lessons for the language, each with a line-by-line transcript, vocabulary list and cultural note. It is the most reliable way to get from zero to comfortable listening, and the free account plus the YouTube channel already cover a lot of ground. Caveats: the site pushes subscriptions hard, the lesson navigation is genuinely confusing, and the upper levels thin out fast — expect to leave it around B1/B2.

Windah Anastasia has built the deepest free listening archive for intermediate Indonesian: over 230 episodes delivered 99% in Indonesian, on culture, daily life and language questions, and still running in 2026. The host tells you to start from episode one, and that is good advice — the early episodes are noticeably slower and more scaffolded. There are no transcripts, so it is a stretch below roughly B1.

Ghozali Saputro's series is explicitly for foreigners learning or maintaining Indonesian, with short episodes that stay comprehensible while still sounding like a native speaker talking. It sits nicely between beginner course audio and full-speed native podcasts. The feed stopped in early 2025, so treat it as a finished archive of about 70 episodes rather than an ongoing show.

Mihalis Eleftheriou records real lessons with a real student and walks you through constructing the language yourself using cognates and logic — Spanish, French, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish, Arabic and Swahili are covered. Completely free, no ads, no sign-up, funded by donations. The Spanish course in particular is one of the most recommended free resources anywhere; the trade-off is small vocabulary and no reading or writing practice.

Mark Pentleton teaches a genuine student while you listen in, across French, Spanish, German, Italian, Chinese, Swedish, Portuguese, Japanese and Gaelic. The podcast seasons are free on any podcast app and are structured as a real curriculum rather than scattered episodes; the Academy sells premium lesson notes, video and bonus audio. Ideal commuting material for beginners through B1, and the Spanish and French series are the strongest.