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Can this website make its own programs? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6540 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 48 05 November 2009 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
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Can this website/forum make its own line of language learning material? Is such a thing possible or even desirable?
Or are language programs only possible through the major publishing companies? If this project were to turn into a co-op, sort of like those co-op grocery stores, then I would gladly contribute. I certainly don't know anything about developing language material, but aren't there a lot of forum members who have experience in developing language programs, especially Prof. Arguelles? This website already has a community of thousands(15,000 registered members and probably another 10,000 lurkers...or is this way off?), so obviously the support is here. Pimsleur and Michel Thomas, the major players in language learning, don't have fan bases as large as this forum. I don't think they even have forums available. Edited by Kugel on 05 November 2009 at 9:12pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Paskwc Pentaglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5679 days ago 450 posts - 624 votes Speaks: Hindi, Urdu*, Arabic (Levantine), French, English Studies: Persian, Spanish | Message 2 of 48 05 November 2009 at 11:01pm | IP Logged |
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It's possible. For examples of community produced programs, have a look at the
wikiuniversity's languages section. There are also separate courses available on wikibooks. The main problem is that this would require a very large amount of time, a burden that most people would be unwilling to take on. Edited by Paskwc on 05 November 2009 at 11:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 48 06 November 2009 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
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There have always been discussions about this sort of thing.
The last attempt got as far as lesson 4.... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 48 06 November 2009 at 12:29am | IP Logged |
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I have made a copy in Word of my five-part guide to language learning, and it filled around 100 full pages. And this is just a small part of my writings here, which again are just a small part of everything that has been written here about learning methods. So I have some sense of the amount of work it would take to write a complete course.
But I have not thought about making textbooks with sample texts and audio because I rarely use that kind of materials myself. However I have seen some sites on the internet where dedicated individuals have made complete courses in language learning, so it is definitely possible -provided that you know your target language extremely well, also on the theoretical level, and have a lot of spare time. However in spite of many long and wellstructured answers to specific problems there is nothing here that adds up to a complete course in any language - not even English. Maybe people are so occupied by learning their own target languages that they can't find time for writing courseware for their own native or near native languages, or maybe they just don't feel that they can deliver something that won't be critized from A to Z. But most likely those people who could write such courses are already doing this at places like the Wikiuniversity or in their own homepages. I doubt that it will happen here. Edited by Iversen on 06 November 2009 at 12:31am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6540 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 48 06 November 2009 at 3:34am | IP Logged |
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Well, the reason I think it could work here is that there is a large "fan base" to begin with, so hopefully such a
course wouldn't be forgotten and buried in obscurity like so many are. How many language learners utilize privately made courses? My guess is very little. The owner of this website already has an option for $39 a year to be a pro-member, leading me to think that why not have an option for a type of co-op language company where each individual contributes a certain amount so that professionals, not just language hobbyists, can design a course that can compete with the big shoots like Pimsleur, Assimil, and Michel Thomas. I'll have to check into Wikiuniversity if it comes close to the quality I"m looking for. As for criticizing the courses, maybe allowing two or three very different methods to be developed for the same language would be possible? Or a simple vote among the co-op members could solve a lot of developmental questions. The idea of a co-op occurred to me because in my area there is a noticeable difference between the co-op grocery stores and that of the big box grocery markets, particularly in the quality. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 6 of 48 06 November 2009 at 4:02am | IP Logged |
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As mentioned by Cainntear, it's not easy to create a course on your own and the endeavour often doesn't go as far as hoped in the hands of dedicated language geeks. (especially if they don't have a lot of spare time and/or not very familiar with teaching methods).
Actually I think that this kind of project would have the greatest chance for success if the participation for a course were kept to a minimum. The more people involved in the creation leads to higher chance of coordination problems as well as disagreements on presentation or layout (I can imagine this being a big barrier if the quantity of threads here about the merit of various learning methods is any guide). Another possibility would be to create a course based on something that's in the public-domain but this doesn't mean that potential course creators must slavishly follow the methods or layout of an old course from FSI. However using such a course as a model may be helpful for people who are interested in providing a course with a basic teaching sequence that has worked (at least within training centers of the State Department). Moreover one should be careful of copyright infringement, hence the potential attraction of adapting something that's in the public-domain in the country where people will work on the course. Incidentally, I recently came across a blog or website where the creator announced that he had got permission to update and edit the existing FSI Conversational Finnish course. As I remember, he made this announcement in 2004 and according to his website, he expected to finish the job by December 2010. Unfortunately, I can't find the URL to the site right now, but if I do I'll post a link here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7378 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes 12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 48 06 November 2009 at 6:21am | IP Logged |
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This is an excellent idea and I've been thinking about it for years. Once I have (finally) set up a wiki here we can definitely get started and I have some definite ideas about how to begin with small, easily finishable projects.
5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 48 06 November 2009 at 12:34pm | IP Logged |
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I'd like to make an observation from the last attempt, led by user Sprachprofi.
The initial plan was a "universal" language course -- ie any language to any language. This forced the course to be structured by phrases and dialogues, because grammatically ordered courses have to be written specifically for any language pair. However, the course required small grammatical and cultural notes to be added to the dialogue, and rather than doing this for every language pair, the course quickly became English->Any Language. Given that there is a lot of material already for learning English from most languages, the theoretical course started to become less and less useful. Even though I didn't like the course style, I had been going to provide Gaelic. However, I wasn't going to write a lesson if I couldn't plan ahead, but everyone was expected to work simultaneously. This was no good: the course was based on repetition and if you've got a choice of two or three translations for a word or phrase in one lesson you need to be able to see when it will be used again to make sure you are using a phrase that can be repeated. For this reason, I felt I couldn't contribute until there were 10 lessons for me to work from, and this never happened. Now here's the important bit: All the work that people put into that course has been lost, as nothing of any value came out of it. The lessons that exist are so basic and short that there is no advantage over any other course that is available. So the first thing to do is produce something that will be of some immediate value, but that can be used to build on later and produce something of greater value. I reckon a good place to start would be with Gradint. It's a fairly simple piece of software and doesn't produce very sophisticated lesson plans, but it has one very powerful strength: it automatically maps any language to any other language. What you do is record a word or a phrase and save it as "(Whatever)_xx.wav" where xx is a ISO language code. You then record the equivalent in another language and save it as the same thing, but with a different language code. So for example, if you save the numbers 1-3 in English, French and Japanese as 1_en.wav 1_fr.wav 1_ja.wav 2_en.wav 2_fr.wav 2_ja.wav 3_en.wav 3_fr.wav 3_ja.wav Then any speaker of any of the three languages could learn to count in any of the other 2 -- that 6 language combinations. Throw in a fourth language and that makes 12 combinations. A fifth language makes 20 combinations -- the growth in potential is rapid and immediate. You don't have to have every word or phrase in every language -- if the pair doesn't exist, the software just skips the word. Meanwhile, we would be building up a bank of words and phrases that could be reused later in more structured courses. I was planning to write to the author of the software suggesting that he add in the ability to have multiple files for a given phrase in a given language, so instead of having just one file 1_en.wav, you could have 1_en_Cainntear.wav, 1_en_Volte.wav etc and the computer would randomly choose one of the files to play. That way we would be exposed to variations in accent... if we wanted to be. Edited by Cainntear on 06 November 2009 at 12:53pm 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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