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E-books and foreign languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Links & Internet Resources |  | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4442 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 9 of 28 30 August 2013 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks to everyone for pointing to the foreign language section on the UK site. Clearly it is not as visible as on e.g. the French site, where you have a button at the very top of the "Kindle" page.
Cavesa, the problem isn't whether you are in the country or not, the problem is that Amazon only lets you have one Kindle account, either linked to their global .com site or to one of the national European sites. When I registered my Kindle account with them, I had to choose between amazon.com or amazon.fr (as I live in France). So I cannot buy from amazon.co.uk, amazon.es or amazon.de, as I do not live in any of those countries. However, I have bought physical stuff, like paperbacks, DVDs etc. from both amazon.de and amazon.co.uk without any problem, it is all rather strange. I really think it is time digital content was treated in the same way as physical content - but it seems both politicians and industry are way behind the technological development when it comes to adapting laws and practices. If an EU-wide petition is launched I'll certainly sign it. The European Parliament actively encourages EU citizens to send them petitions, as per this link. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4631 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 10 of 28 30 August 2013 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||
Perhaps you (and anyone else who feels strongly) should write to your MEP. They are well paid, and I've never been sure what they do, but perhaps this is something they might actually be useful for. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4442 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 11 of 28 30 August 2013 at 6:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Montmorency, I live a short walk from the European Parliament building so I could tell you a lot about what
MEPs do, but this forum is not the place for it. Being from Norway which is not in the EU I don't have a MEP, but I guess I could make some noises with the help of French and British friends I have here. Anyway, my point with this thread was not to start a debate on e-policy, but rather to raise the point about finding e-books in foreign languages. I took amazon as an example because it is one of the major players, but would be interested in knowing what others have to offer as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4471 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 12 of 28 30 August 2013 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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Most Norwegian bookstores sell e-books in Norwegian (you can choose between Bokmaal and Nynorsk),
but with a hefty price tag. Digitalization more often than not means a digital book (be it in an pdf form or as an Android/Kindle/Apple format) is sold at the very same price as the print/paper book. There is no printing/ink/paper cost, yet they still sell it at the original price?! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4425 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 13 of 28 30 August 2013 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I sometimes wonder how people actually learned languages in the past, unless they were in the country
where the language was spoken. We have so many resources at our fingertips nowadays: online dictionaries, TV & radio available worldwide, instantly downloadable e-books, Skype chats, podcasts, language exchanges, cheap flights, endless video footage. Sure, the learner still has to put in the work but there is just so much material out there and so many ways to interact with native speakers. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4692 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 14 of 28 30 August 2013 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a thought: If I buy a kindle from Amazon.fr, and register it under a new name and
account, could I then buy French eBooks on it even though I'm in the States? (I'm going to cross-post this on MetaFilter; I'll let you all know if I learn anything there). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4631 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 15 of 28 31 August 2013 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||
I wonder, for example, about people like Queen Elizabeth I, who supposedly spoke 6 foreign languages by the age of 11, and also knew some Portuguese and Welsh (the latter of particular interest to me, as I've recently started learning it - the fact that she was a Tudor may explain the Welsh). I imagine that she may have had native-speaking tutors. ... hmm....according to Wikipedia, her teachers seem to have been mostly English native speakers, although she appears to have learned Cornish from a Cornishman. However, less privileged people would not have had these advantages, and yet there have been other examples of prolific language ability in earlier times, when technology was not a factor (other than book-printing technology). It seems that Queen Elizabeth I was a very well-educated woman, although it is also possible that some of the accounts of her proficiency may also be due to a certain amount of sycophancy, or that it might not always have been possible to accurately assess her actual, as opposed to her apparent proficiency. EDIT: I was thinking more about this. Perhaps the secret (in E. I's case) was having personal tutoring, even if they weren't necessarily native speakers. When I thought about it, I realised that a lot of the linguists well-known to HTLAL-ers and similar places have used tutors at least for certain periods, or have actually been or still are tutors, or both. If I remember correctly, Splog, Benny, and Luca, for example, have all made use of tutors at certain times, and I think Luca tutors in several languages of which he is not a native speaker. I think several regular contributors to HTLAL are themselves tutors. What may possibly be drawn from this is that, although they may happen to use internet and Skype (or similar) technology to make this happen easily, the "magic" ingredient is the personal and individual contact. This has always been possible, long before technology made it easy, if one was prepared to work hard enough to find the right person (or lucky enough to have one "given" to you). So maybe that's the main secret of successful linguists / polyglots of the past. Edited by montmorency on 31 August 2013 at 2:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6712 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 28 31 August 2013 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
A thread from 12 May 2009: Language Studies in the past 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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