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Multilingual forum | ||
Tags: Multilingual | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Multilingual Lounge |  | |
| brendan Newbie New Zealand Joined 6784 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 35 26 July 2006 at 12:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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What a wonderful site this is. Congratulations to all involved and for the source of inspiration you provide. But there is one thing that seems intuitively wrong with the concept of learning languages but restricting the forum to one language. Has a multilingual forum been trialled? and I don't mean the defunct Multilingual Lounge, as that was an opt-in, an option. What I mean is, has the main forum had a multilingual outing? Can we try it? ie.let people respond in their chosen language? Historical precedents aren't good I know, Tower of Babel and all! but it would be in keeping with what we're all aspiring to. And what's more, all the time we spend here could double as study time.What do others think?
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| administrator Hexaglot Forum Admin Switzerland FXcuisine.com Joined 7376 days ago 3094 posts - 2987 votes  12 sounds Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 35 26 July 2006 at 3:54am | IP Logged | |||||
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Brendan, welcome to our forum and thank you for your interest. I'll be glad to oblige those members who wish to write in other languages than English but we need to discuss how it should be done. I have seen several options so far:
1) Any language anywhere Threads contain replies in a variety of language. I don't like this because unless you are Cardinal Mezzofanti, you are bound not to understand part of it. We could have it if every non-English text had an English translation underneath, a rather hefty price methinks. 2) Special multilingual area A place where people can type in any languages. We tried this as the 'Multilingual Lounge' but after a couple months it had only crap in it, a sort of chat room really. 3) Language specific threads Such as a 'Spanish thread' where all replies are written in Spanish. We have that but I don't think it is very satisfactory for our members who want to use their target languages. 4) Language specific rooms The best solution I have seen so far is to have a special subforum or room devoted to the most popular languages. We could have a Spanish room and a German room and others. We cannot really have 100 different rooms to indulge each language, but we could have 5 or 6 'popular' languages. The rule would be that everything in those rooms is to be written in the target language. Please let me know what you think of these options or if you think up of other options. Please do bear in mind that I want this forum to retain its quality and am not keen on having 'anything goes' chat room, but rather a resource that can be enjoyed by members and lurkers alike and that can be used as a reference even long after the discussions have taken place. Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fredomirek Tetraglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6906 days ago 265 posts - 264 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 3 of 35 26 July 2006 at 5:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think itīs quite a good idea to have such a place in the forum but, as you said, it should be thought over profoundly.
Option 1) No way..it would be such a mess that probably people not knowing at least 7-8 languages fluently (like me) would simply be discouraged by not understanding half of the forum.. Option 2) If you say it didn't work out.. maybe it's not the best solution, Option 3) I like this option, as it is now. A few people wanting to use Spanish are simply developing the thread and it's not just "chatting about nothing". A few other can be created such as "French thread" "Italian thread" (I haven't seen these yet) and I believe it would be enough. Option 4) I believe some of these subforums would be simply empty, look at the "Spanish thread" or any other.. it's enough. If one thread suffices, the whole subforum would never be full or at least not empty I suppose. It's just my opinion on this matter, I hope many other forum members will just say what they think about it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 35 26 July 2006 at 5:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I would choose alternative four since I don't think that the subforums would be empty. Every thread related to that particular languages would be in that section, including beginner's questions such as "How do you say ...?" or "Why does ... happen?".
Perhaps the "Specific Languages" room could be divided into six or seven subforums. Five or six of these could be devoted to the most popular languages (based on the most studied ones in the profiles) and the remaining subforum could be for all other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 5 of 35 26 July 2006 at 5:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree with most of what fredomirek and patuco have said, although I feel that language-specific subforums would be a nice addition. If the idea is kept to the most popular languages (which would no doubt include the major Romance languages, German, Chinese and Japanese), it would help members find topics of interest to them even quicker than before. Perhaps the subforums could include the 'chat' threads we currently have plus be a place where members can ask questions about those specific languages.
The multilingual posts would not really work all that well in general discussion as we don't all know the same few languages, plus some of us are not as confident with our languages as others may be. In reality, one common language is a far more practical option. I'm sure there may be some who are a little concerned that English has to be that language but, let's face it, it's probably the most widely-spread taught language in the world at the moment. Still, I do feel a little sorry for anyone who is not very confident with their English as badly-worded posts with spelling and grammar errors do get frowned upon too... Edited by lady_skywalker on 26 July 2006 at 5:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 7015 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 35 26 July 2006 at 7:04am | IP Logged | |||||
I forgot to mention this in my post. Thanks Kelly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lady_skywalker Triglot Senior Member Netherlands aspiringpolyglotblog Joined 6890 days ago 909 posts - 942 votes Speaks: Spanish, English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, French, Dutch, Italian | Message 7 of 35 26 July 2006 at 7:16am | IP Logged | |||||
No probs. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6768 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 8 of 35 26 July 2006 at 8:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm in favour of #1 and #3. With #3, you could even have such fun as
bilingual threads. Administrator says "we have that", but we don't, since I got berated not long ago for trying to start a thread in Japanese. Which leads to another thing: this forum does not reliably work with Unicode yet. If I want to type any Japanese or insert an IPA character, I have to fiddle with my browser's encoding settings both while making the post and afterwards to read it. Other language forums, like Wordreference.com, just work. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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