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Language Programs: Digital or Hardcopy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6813 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes  Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 17 18 September 2012 at 12:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have terabytes of (mostly useless*) courses, ebooks, audiobooks, etc, but give me a paperback and a CD (or, dare I say...tape!) any day.
It's not that I don't like technology, nor do I distrust it, but I've often found that the more advanced technology gets, the more things that could and invariably, with my luck, will go wrong which I just don't know how to fix. Oh well, this caveman's off to hunt some mammoths... * useless only beacuse I'm not going to be on Earth long enough to read them all, not because of their content. Edited by patuco on 18 September 2012 at 12:35am 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4928 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 10 of 17 18 September 2012 at 1:00am | IP Logged | |||||
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I like reading and listening to some courses on my tablet at night, usually before bed.
On the other hand, if I'm sitting at my desk - computer or not, give me a hard copy that I can easily mark up all I want. The desk is where I write/keep most of my notes. I never make use of those notes while reading in bed. Maybe if it were easier to mark up a PDF file, I would. I suppose I can do annotations in the PDF, but it's just not the same as real, physical writing on paper. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 6944 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 11 of 17 18 September 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I recorded all my language courses on cassettes from records and now they have been cleaned and converted to mp3 files. I find it extremely helpful that I can play the recordings anywhere on my mp3 player and listen while I am walking or shopping in the mall. I do my serious study at home but play the audio while I am out for revision.
I need to use the books for the courses because they simply can't be read on my e-readers. I like to use the books anyway. As Mrhenry says, you can mark the books (with pencil) and make notes of difficulties, translations or things you find important. I like to have both a hard and a soft copy. But, I LOVE my Kindle. I have programs that convert pdf to files that can be read by Kindle. So far I have been unsuccessful with language books as the formatting gets messed up. If I have a hard copy of a book I read for pleasure and a Kindle copy I find it easier to read it on Kindle. I have some language books especially written for Kindle with mp3 audio I can play on the same Kindle while I read it but I have found it awkward to manipulate both the text and the audio together. I think with all of the technology and the options available it has never been easier to learn a language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4687 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 12 of 17 18 September 2012 at 5:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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For novels, the built-in dictionary on my kindle has been an amazing tool. I don't like
using pdf's on it, though. For actual language courses I need to flip back and forth too much, and prefer a hard copy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 5949 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 13 of 17 18 September 2012 at 10:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm very much a physical copy person, and I'll print out PDF's instead of reading them on a computer. This has it's disadvantages, as my apartment is now littered with various FSI lessons in a number of different languages. I've also obtained PDF's from a certain Uzbek bazaar, but this has then led me to track down physical copies. E.g. Modern Russian 1, Beginning Polish. The main reason I use physical copies for language study is due to the fact that I spend about nine hours at work in front of a computer.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ericblair Senior Member United States Joined 4509 days ago 480 posts - 700 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 14 of 17 19 September 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I thought I'd hate using Assimil on my laptop after having the hard-copy editions of Russian and Italian with ease, and also German without Toil.
However, I have been using New French With Ease on my laptop, and love it. I have a Nook, but have never read a book on it, haha. I think I generally prefer hard copies, but I am adapting. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jondesousa Tetraglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/Zgg3nRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6062 days ago 227 posts - 297 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Mandarin, Spanish | Message 15 of 17 19 September 2012 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I enjoy hard copies from time to time, especially when starting a new language where you frequently need to refer
back a few chapters and sometimes need to go forward to the indexes and appendices. That being said, I am on average reading in 4-5 languages per day It would be mildly cumbersome to carry 4-5 books with me everywhere I go and since I don't like to spend countless hours on a single task, picking only one or two books to bring would not be convenient. Of course, everyone is different and my experiences may not be the same as another; however, whenever possible, especially when I am passed the intermediate stage in a language, my preference is to go electronic to facilitate carrying around loads of content. I tend to access this information via one of four ways: when traveling long distances or at home I tend to use my MacBook Air, when traveling around on the weekend or lounging at home I normally use my iPad, when listening to audio I usually just use my iPhone, and when I plan on reading for extended periods of time, or if I am trying to travel very light I'll just bring my Kindle. That usually keeps me more than stocked with content in English, Latin, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Esperanto. I am very rarely bored. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6237 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 16 of 17 20 September 2012 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Like Arekkusu, I have much more knowledge due to ebooks. However, both Arekkusu and Juan raise valid points. Some ebooks are aimed at preserving knowledge and disseminating it; Project Gutenberg springs to mind. Others are locked in proprietary, DRM-filled formats, and Juan is absolutely right to criticise these sharply - at their worst, these formats disenfrancise huge percentages of the world through region-locking (much like with DVDs), limit a user's access to books they've acquired, and entirely eliminate both long-term access to the book for the user, and any type of fair-use lending or reselling. Digital content makes far more available than is feasible with paper copies. With the internet, I can look at anything from Project Runeberg through classical Japanese texts. Even the world's largest libraries simply cannot house the same range of quality material, for every language with a literary tradition. Crippled digital content, with region restrictions and DRM, is something Juan is quite right to criticize. Today, he cannot buy some books to due to his location, and I'm sometimes forced to use German rather than Italian or English due to restrictions done badly, and DVDs have demonstrated that a lot of content simply never becomes available for most regions. Technology holds a lot of promise. However, while Juan correctly points out that it is sometimes used in fashionable yet useless ways, I think it's simply another issue which cannot be simplified to this degree while maintaining any degree of intellectual rigour; rather, a discussion on the level of "ebooks good/ebooks bad" becomes more of the mindless pap which he decries. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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