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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| hobbitofny Senior Member United States Joined 6232 days ago 280 posts - 408 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Russian | Message 113 of 171 17 August 2010 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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These language courses are the produce an era. A time when the USA had a efficient government. Example, my first passport in middle of 1970s was two weeks to process. It was not a rush process, but normal. My last passport renewal was 12 weeks! If I needed it as a rush, it would have been 2 weeks.
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| Hobbema Senior Member United States Joined 5740 days ago 541 posts - 575 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese, French, Dutch | Message 114 of 171 17 August 2010 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Has anybody come across this web site? http://www.foreignserviceinstitute.com/
It looks like they're taking the public domain material and repackaging it, then selling it for high prices. They claim to have the copyrights. I'm assuming it's the original FSI material from the description even though I can't view it from their links.
I don't know if they can actually purchase the copyrights or not, but even so, I don't recognize their intellectual rights, because: 1. They are capitalizing on someone else's work 2. They're taking advantage of people who may want to learn a language and don't know better. 3. As mentioned earlier here, our taxes already payed for this! 4. Their website is designed to look like something intimidating and official, which plain just pisses me off. Edited by Hobbema on 17 August 2010 at 7:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 115 of 171 17 August 2010 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"All our courses are copyrighted. We are starting to file lawsuits against sites offering free downloads. Everyone knows stealing is wrong, and we will find and sue individuals that download our courses for free for theft of services."
This is a joke, even when you have a company which produces their OWN courses (like Pimsleur) and a website which was providing links to free downloads of said courses (decided to delete name), in other words blatant violation of copyright, all that happened was that the site was instructed to remove the links on pain of legal action, which it did. Don't worry about the FSI website, those guys are REALLY careful, right down to only posting stuff obtained from the US government (and they could have posted a LOT more if they had used FSI courses from commercial sources), for which they require photographic evidence before posting. For instance they have the pdfs for the MSA course, but not the audio, even though the audio can be downloaded from the above illegal site. Edited by Random review on 18 August 2010 at 12:32am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6228 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 116 of 171 17 August 2010 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here you go guys!
I think the files expire after 60 days so if anyone wants to create mirrors, that would be great! DLI Serbo Croatian pdf Files Serbo Croatian audio1 Serbo Croatian Audio 2 Serbo Croatian audio 3 Serbo Croatian audio 4 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| liddytime Pentaglot Senior Member United States mainlymagyar.wordpre Joined 6228 days ago 693 posts - 1328 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Galician Studies: Hungarian, Vietnamese, Modern Hebrew, Norwegian, Persian, Arabic (Written) | Message 117 of 171 18 August 2010 at 12:42am | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah.... It's the exact same thing that Audio-Forum (now defunct) and MultiLingual Books and Tapes and several other companies have been doing for years! They put their name and logo on something that is public domain and charge exorbitant prices for it! I was one of the fools that paid for it!! :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5782 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 118 of 171 18 August 2010 at 1:03am | IP Logged | |||||
Just 2 days it took you to put these up, and that in a week that is "crazy busy" for you. Very surprising! Well I was undecided which language to start in January but it's going to have to be Serbo-Croat now or I'm going to feel guilty as hell! Cheers a lot for this upload Liddytime, much obliged. Oh well, I kind of wanted to try a Slavic one anyway and was leaning away from hitting Russian first because there's no FSI Basic Course. Edited by Random review on 18 August 2010 at 1:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 119 of 171 18 August 2010 at 2:56am | IP Logged | |||||
What's noteworthy about these guys is: 1) they present their courses' layout in a way that mimics Pimsleur's kits and so seem to be trying to capitalize on the recognition factor of Pimsleur's "look" (couldn't that be construed as copyright violation of Pimsleur's design/image?) 2) the justification to use unusually low compression rates of 300 kb/s over 300 kHz (I think that they meant the compression rate should be 320 kb/s NOT 300 kb/s - possibly sloppy editing on the part of the site's creator(s) since 300 is not a multiple of 8 as is usual when counting memory or compression in computers) is to ensure that the audio has the required frequency range that is required for a number of their language courses because of the languages being tonal languages. Ummm... if that's the case, then their justification fails for a good portion of their inventory. When I last checked, Amharic, Arabic, Cambodian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian among several others aren't tonal languages. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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