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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6241 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 1 of 13 12 November 2013 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
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Since I have discovered Listening-Reading I have taught myself to understand a decent
number of languages, but my active knowledge was, well, not so good, except for two languages. So I spent a lot of time experimenting with what could be a solution for that particular problem. I've tried shadowing (it really helps a lot), translating sentences and texts back and forth, but I seriously doubt that there is anything better than audio lingual drills for activating one's passive knowledge. What I mean by that are, of course, the exercises you can find in courses like FSI and DLI. However, many of these courses have a number of issues: - they are usually very old and sometimes downright outdated (FSI Greek for example) - not all languages are covered (FSI Italian is a disgrace, for example) - the audio is often terrible quality So I wonder if we could make some kind of Wiki where we could colaborate to make such copyright-free courses (with audio if possible). Is anyone here interested to discuss the feasibility of such a project? Or has there already been a similar discussion that I'm not aware of? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4622 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 2 of 13 12 November 2013 at 8:41pm | IP Logged |
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I think it would only have real value if it had audio, but then, yes, sounds very
interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6241 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 3 of 13 12 November 2013 at 9:19pm | IP Logged |
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Well, it depends: I'm finding Chiuchiu's "In Italiano" very helphul so far. There is no
audio for the exercises, but they are so very well organized, (almost like FSI) that one can really master the structure of the language. But I digress; we should certainly go for the full audio course, you're right about that. Edited by MarcoDiAngelo on 12 November 2013 at 9:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5659 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 4 of 13 13 November 2013 at 8:35pm | IP Logged |
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I would be interested in cooperating full-time on a project like this. I've often thought of basing a course off the FSI Spanish (or rather, Platiquemos) course, just because i think it's so well organized.
I think it would be worthwhile to gather a list of important grammar points to cover and build a nice vocabulary list based on frequency, with more emphasis put on the spoken language. And i definitely think you need the audio, what's so great about Platiquemos is how portable it is, i usually just needed to look at the book once to read the explanations and notes and to pick out the tough words/sentences i couldn't hear correctly, probably due to the quality of the audio. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| embici Triglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4404 days ago 263 posts - 370 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Greek | Message 5 of 13 14 November 2013 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
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I for one would love to see an updated (and de-militarized) version of FSI/DLI for Greek.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5056 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 6 of 13 14 November 2013 at 2:12am | IP Logged |
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These things always sound like a great idea, until it's time to get down to practicalities. Typically, interest tends to wane once real work is involved. A site called "ielanguages.com" tried to upgrade FSI by converting it to html and epub: FSI Language Courses HTML Project. It was a great idea, but it fizzled out. One of the reasons it fizzled out is because it's a lot of tedious work for volunteers.
I, myself, thought about making the DLI Portuguese course into a clean, word/open office document-generated pdf with modern Portuguese orthographic accord spellings, but it's an 80 lesson, nine volume course. It is tedious and time-consuming, unpaid, work. I wouldn't mind it so much if I only had to do ten pages or so and someone else would do the next ten, etc. The model I think could be most appropriate would be the librivox.org model, rather than the wiki model. Such a model would require a leader or a group of leaders to coordinate the efforts of volunteers and to make sure their work is satisfactory. For example: the fonts, font sizes, margins, line spacing, etc., would have to be consistent- a template would have to be developed and followed. Also, many of the older pdf's have stretches of text that may have faded or poorly scanned text that would have to be agreed upon before becoming canon. Just cleaning up some of the pdf's would be a huge job. The audio would have to be consistent. You might not want to record, say, an FSI-style Italian course with speakers from all regions of Italy randomly appearing inconsistently in lessons or every lesson by a speaker with a different accent, for example. The Haitian Creole DLI Course, itself, is fairly recent (revised in 1994) so the pdf is in good shape. The course's audio is horrible to incomprehensible. How would you get decent audio re-recorded by volunteer Haitian Creole-speakers? Italian, German and the big languages, sure. Small languages could be problematic. So, if people are serious about doing this, bear in mind that it is easier said than done. It will be a lot more work than it might appear to be on the surface. Edited by iguanamon on 14 November 2013 at 3:24am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5659 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 7 of 13 14 November 2013 at 2:32am | IP Logged |
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I don't know if the idea is to revise already written FSI courses or to create some from scratch based off the FSI model, which would be even more work. I don't think anyone expects this to be easy, but right now i have plenty of time (several hours a day) to dedicate to this, and i don't see that changing in the near future. This is something i've wanted to do for a long time and also something i'm really motivated for.
As for the audio, i'm not sure how it might be for a language like Haitian Creole, but i don't think it'd be completely out of the question to get people to record for some smaller languages. I can see it working for regional languages like Catalan, Occitan, Basque, Galician, Sardinian, etc. where there's already a strong movement to preserve/promote the language. I also wouldn't mind paying someone/a group of people for a high-quality recording, just as long as the audio remains "copyright-free". I think the most important part would be having a core group of motivated people, since as you said it will be a lot of work. MarcoDiAngelo, you can count on me for this project :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6241 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 8 of 13 14 November 2013 at 7:45am | IP Logged |
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No one expects this to be easy, that's for sure. One of the reasons FSI HTML project
might have failed is that people weren't motivated enough (plus I imagine how tedious that work must have been). This project, I suspect, would be much more interesting and valuable for the language learning community. As for coordination, I believe the group should keep in touch regularly via Skype, MSN, etc. Perhaps the group should be made of fewer, but more motivated individuals for each language. @crush Like you, I would like to participate in such a project if there were one, but I am in no way capable of starting it myself. We need a lot of IT-savvy persons for that, I suppose. PS: I just got an idea. Maybe we don't need a website for this. What if we could divide the work between us and keep in touch. Let's say we create an X-language Basic Course. One person could make the structure of the course (modules, grammar covered in each module), the other person could write the dialogues, someone could write the drills, and they could all collaborate to record a good quality audio. Once finished, the course could float on the internet as a torrent file or something similar. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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