🇮🇩 The best podcasts for learning Indonesian

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.

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.