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Making our own Assimil | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 113 of 130 10 November 2008 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
On one hand, I see your point. On the other hand, that's been tried at least twice by this forum, and died very quickly. As for how planned the Assimil courses seem - it varies significantly from course to course.
You're probably right (and only probably; voluntary collaboration can be quite powerful). On the other hand, I don't think Assimil could easily afford to make the type of effort this project is making: it takes them 3 years to make a course (for the French base, not counting translations to other bases), and there are a fairly limited number of polyglots as accomplished as Sprachprofi for them to hire. People are pointing out problems even at this point - and some can be fixed. This much peer review and feedback so early on is very rare in less open projects, to the best of my knowledge.
The Italian one is actually fairly complicated: the speaker uses the informal form, assuming he's talking to someone he knows, and then, on finding out he was mistaken, switches to a formal apology. Formality doesn't map cleanly across even closely related languages, unfortunately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 5842 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 114 of 130 10 November 2008 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think perhaps that a space needs to be devoted towards it and not all the problems talked about in one space.
Divide and conquer has merit here. Reminds me of a house I once lived in. Out the back in the laundry we used to sit and there listening to music while smoking. There was a shower, toilet and everything back there. We all used to comment on how many things you could do in there and tried to make names for the room and verbs for the combined actions. It got a bit messy though hilarious! :D Shalom, Yehoshua. Edited by J-Learner on 10 November 2008 at 11:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5921 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 115 of 130 10 November 2008 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
On the other hand the situation depicted in dialog 2 is somewhat ambiguous. Usually the first dialogs in a textbook make it clear whether it is a formal or informal setting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5823 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 116 of 130 10 November 2008 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Quite. And I'll repeat what I said in the other thread. "She???" is said as Tom echoing Man 2's exact word. However, this is not very clear and the learner may well assume it to be a demonstrative, which in English is normal the objective form ("her", in this case) when it's not being used in a proper sentence. If you look at the Bulgarian translation, this has been replaced with "O!". 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5823 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 117 of 130 10 November 2008 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Design by committee doesn't work, agreed. However, if this project has a single designated designer in Sprachprofi, then the rest of us are merely "checking correctness" rather than designing the course. It is then up to Sprach to decide whether or not to implement our recommendations. Anyone who's unhappy with that doesn't have to be involved in the project. Sprachprofi can then release a "definitive" English version for translation, and anyone who's still happy can translate it. Of course, if Sprachprofi isn't willing to accept the word of all the native speakers that "I'm well" is incorrect English, then the project won't go very far. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6251 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 118 of 130 10 November 2008 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'll take the blame for that one; I defended "I'm well", and I'm a native speaker. The simple fact of the matter is that conventional responses to "How are you?" vary in English; I'd hesitate to call any of them incorrect, and "I'm well" doesn't seem all that utterly rare to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 119 of 130 10 November 2008 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You can do more than just checking correctness, you could also translate (if you have an excellent grasp of a language other than English), provide notes (here it actually helps to be a non-native) or provide literal translations. And I'm open to any dialog suggestions if somebody believes he can write a dialog that does not throw in advanced grammar or idioms too early. To spot this kind of thing and avoid it is a talent rare even among language teachers. As for the "I'm well" issue: my first instinct was to use "I'm fine", but since this is about learning other languages, I don't want people to think we're teaching the word "fine". I have yet to see a second language that uses the word "fine" in this context. I'm also afraid of people translating "fine" literally despite my requests for natural-sounding translations. I did not go with "I'm good" because somebody on this thread said that "I'm good" offends her ears, or something to that effect. It doesn't sound good to me either. However, I'm in favor of replacing "I'm well" with "I'm fine" once translations of lesson 1 are completed or once we're looking at turning this material into a course to learn English on the basis of many languages. I believe that if the material is good enough to learn several other languages based on English, we've already achieved more than Assimil, because they only do one language at a time and they take a long time to develop, too. And that was the basic idea proposed towards the beginning of this thread after all: to provide Assimil-style materials for people who don't want to learn French and/or for languages that Assimil doesn't cover. If afterwards it's possible to turn it around and make it an English course for many, that's awesome. If it's possible to make it a course for any language to learn any language, that would be even more awesome, but I frankly don't think it's possible to create materials that neutral, and there's still the issue of having to re-translate everything, so most likely we still wouldn't wind up with Arabic-based courses or the like. Edited by Sprachprofi on 10 November 2008 at 3:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5846 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 120 of 130 10 November 2008 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It is replaced with "O" because it used to be "Oh"... I suggest that we add some sort of version tags to the dialogs that are increased with every change. This way it will be clear if the translations are up to date with the last edition of the dialog. ( Nonetheless, major changes are not translated without effort and so they should probably be avoided. ) Edited by Sennin on 10 November 2008 at 3:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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