|
 |
Source for older Assimil/Linguaphone? | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| stuartarden Diglot Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5846 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: Welsh, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 7 01 May 2008 at 7:31am | IP Logged | ||
|
Professor,
As can be seen from your various reviews of learning material, you advocate using older editions of Assimil and Linguaphone. Do you know of anywhere that older editions can be obtained? Also, do you know of a way to convert the cassette/CD recordings that come with the older editions to mp3? Stuart Edited by stuartarden on 04 May 2008 at 7:57am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kugel Senior Member United States Joined 6319 days ago 497 posts - 555 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 2 of 7 04 May 2008 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||
|
I bought old German and Russian Linguaphone programs from ebay. Naturally, you're going to need a record player that can play 45s and 33s. In order to convert them into MP3, you can buy an external sound card(I doubt that you have line-in and line-outs on your current sound card) and a special wire that connects into the phones jack of your record/cassette player. So if you are willing to wait a few weeks for the bid to end and shipping time(you're talking weeks if its form Europe, as the old programs are very heavy), okay with dropping $40 for a sound card, and then spending a lot of time editing the files into MP3 tracks, then go for it. Unless I wanted to find an Irish or some hard-to-find program, I would not go through the process again. Edited by Kugel on 04 May 2008 at 3:48pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7037 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 3 of 7 04 May 2008 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I do not have any particular source. As has been pointed out, you can look on Ebay and even advertise for particular courses through the miracle of the computer. You should also let you local used booksellers know that you are in the market for these courses, as otherwise they may pass up the opportunity to purchase them when it arises. Finally, contact any language laboratories at educational institutions near you and let them know that, when and if they discard old materials to make way for new, you would be appreciate being notified.
As for converting the recordings, no, I am too technologically challenged to do that, though I need to learn myself. But is there any reason you must have mp3 files? Finding a means to make older phonograph records portable so that you can shadow them is indeed a challenge, but cassette tapes and CDs are still serviceable, are they not? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Andrew J Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5828 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* | Message 4 of 7 05 May 2008 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Stuart
I've been looking for Spanish material on e-bay (dot co dot uk) over the last couple of days. There seem to be some great prices available for cassette (rather than CD) based Linguaphone courses. There is one there at the moment I am considering bidding for - no bids yet but priced at just £5 plus £10 postage. There are also lots of other languages available. I suspect if you looked each day you could find all sorts of interesting materials. I've had the same concern as you regarding transferring the cassettes to mp3 format. I did a search on ask.co.uk and found plenty of advice to hand. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Budz Octoglot Senior Member Australia languagepump.com Joined 6154 days ago 118 posts - 171 votes Speaks: German*, English, Russian, Esperanto, Ukrainian, Mandarin, Cantonese, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Persian, Hungarian, Kazakh, Swahili, Vietnamese, Polish | Message 5 of 7 05 May 2008 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
|
Yeah, transferring to mp3 is pretty easy. Most computers nowadays have a microphone and speaker input in the front but at the back you should find those two plus also a line-in jack. As long as you have a line-out jack on your cassette player it's really easy. And there's some good free audio editing software out there too.
The linguaphone will probably go for a bit more than 5 pounds, but I'm in Australia and I found it worth-while buying linguaphones from England on ebay despite the much higher postage price. Oh, and for French assimil courses, it's strange that some assimil will show up just within your normal anglo-ebay, but you need to search within .fr ebay to get the full range. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jeza Newbie Australia Joined 5768 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 6 of 7 12 July 2008 at 10:42pm | IP Logged | ||
Preservation of the recorded material would be a good reason. Tapes stretch a tiny bit with each play back, so over time the quality degrades slightly (though if you can avoid fast forward/rewind, this problem is minimised). Records suffer from the same problem as well, due to physical contact between needle and the medium. CDs don't have this problem, provided the discs are handled with care. Digital formats such as MP3 certainly don't have any such problems either. However, if you are digitising for preservation, you'd probably want at least one copy in a raw uncompressed format. Of course, MP3s also have a huge convenience factor as well, since you can carry an entire collection of audio in one device. While you also avoid the need to deal with physical media. Once you have something in CD format, it's rather trivial to convert to MP3 (or another digital format), since all you need is a CD-ROM drive and software such as iTunes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5792 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 7 of 7 13 July 2008 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||
No. It's what you use to connect it to a hifi amplifier. If there´s no line out, you can get a reasonable sound from the headphone socket. However, if you're using a headphone socket you've got to be careful about the volume. Having it too low will mean that all the noise and the hiss in the system will be louder in the final recording. (Because the signal has been turned down, the computer must compensate by increasing the volume. This will increase the level of both the signal and the noise.) Having it too high will mean the sound will distort, making it go a bit "crunchy" or "grungy" sounding. They say that having it way too high can damage your inputs, but I never had that problem in my pre-MP3 days when I used a portable MiniDisc player a lot -- I think most modern equipment can handle it. The sound out of a headphone socket isn't a perfect reproduction, but it's too technical to be worth explaining and most people wouldn't notice anyway. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
