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Building SE Asian Courses - Right Track? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| snoonan Triglot Newbie United States learningindones Joined 6045 days ago 23 posts - 56 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Indonesian | Message 9 of 40 02 November 2013 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks! The method in the original course is pretty far behind our current one, so it would be interesting to see the Thai stuff will be received. Our first non Malay is going to be Tagalog, so that's where we'll see how well it generalizes. Hopefully when we get to Thai after that, it will be battle tested. Though you may have to bear with our first round of work in tonal languages (We think Thai and Vietnamese are better crucibles to forge new tonal materials than, say, Mandarin.)
Malayalam is interesting because it's very large, but doesn't have a strong lingua franca element to it according to my research. The ratio of speakers to non-native speakers and learners is quite low, BUT there is a large demand online for at least some learning materials. We don't know how serious that interest is and if a full blown course is of interest. What we'll likely do for Malayalam and others in this category is setup some basic resources and maybe do a phrases podcast to see if people actually seek it out and ask for more. Let real interest from learners help to prioritize it. So, the same would go for Kannada, Telugu and Marathi. We strongly suspect Tamil is a go for a full course because there are a lot of secondary speakers, indicating a strong draw to learn it as a local lingua franca. That might make it easier and more likely we'd be able to building out a more complete Malayalam course given the related nature and perhaps interest among people engaged with the southern part of India in general. Glad to see serendipitous interest in this area. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3938 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 40 02 November 2013 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'll be learning Tagalog next Spring. Resources are few and far between, and seem to get dated very quickly. I think
Tagalog as a language changes far too fast for a print resource to keep up! I would definitely be interested in trying out an online resource like the one you describe. Edited by Stelle on 02 November 2013 at 4:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3938 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 11 of 40 02 November 2013 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As for what I'd like as an independent learner…
- SRS flashcards with audio that I can use on my phone - texts aimed at beginners (I learn a lot through reading) - even better if there's audio to go with it - podcasts aimed at late beginner and early intermediate speakers that talk about the actual world (kind of like what notesinspanish.com does for Spanish - careful pronunciation, but topics that go far beyond the "this is how you say hello" teaching tools) - links to native material: music, videos, blogs, etc I really like the idea of a Pimsleur-style approach to build automaticity. The problem with Pimsleur is that it uses a very stilted and unnatural Tagalog - my Tagalog-speaking family members all told me that nobody actually talks like that. So if you're going to do Pimsleur/MT style lessons, you'll have to make sure that it's actual conversational Tagalog. While tutors and language exchange partners are fantastic tools, I can get those elsewhere - tutors through italki (where I teach a few classes, so they're effectively free for me), conversation practice in person from my Tagalog- speaking husband, his family, and the many many filipinos who've immigrated to Canada. So I'd like the option to opt out - or else for the price to be affordable enough that I won't worry about not using all of the resources that I'm paying for. I'm excited to see what you end up doing! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6376 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 12 of 40 04 November 2013 at 7:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I just want to say that this is awesome and makes me consider taking up one of these languages again. So happy to see there are resources coming along for these interesting yet oft-neglected languages.
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| snoonan Triglot Newbie United States learningindones Joined 6045 days ago 23 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Indonesian | Message 13 of 40 05 November 2013 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
We aim to address solidly these points, though the notesinspanish.com is interesting. This is somewhat like our topic-oriented passages which will have text in L1 & L2 and audio in L2. I do like their straightforward delivery. The idea is to use them straight L2 or in a few permutations of reading and listening methods. That's not nailed down. This really depends on how good the voice people are. We may mix it up with a lot of different folks and have them free-form riff on what they're reading together. It really does depend on who's doing the reading, though. You're right about Pimsleur, for sure. We don't aim to duplicate Pimsleur, but suggest it as an example. I think their claim of spaced repetition is dubious since the recording has no control over how it is played. We will leave that to adaptive SRS software! They are also too disjointed in how they're written and produced. They probably just rely on recording once and selling forever if they can get away with it. Both of those lead to stiltedness like you say. The writers should be able to write more or less how 20/30-somethings speak, and the readers should be free to do takes that sound more natural to them. In fact, right now we have local people (not educators!) going through our Indonesian material and reworking/relaxing it in this way. We are also going to experiment with doing yearly revisions so the courses maintain their relevancy, even in innovation-loving Tagalog. You can't count on a 20 year old recording for these quickly evolving languages.
Thanks! Right now I am imagining the course as a DNA double-helix (Call them A & B)-- A side is the self-study track, B is the live/interactive humans. Those tutors are trained in what we're doing and have access to your word bank to know what you know and where you are on the A side, so it's a good integration. But they are loosely coupled. There's no reason why you'd be required to pay for peoples' time if you're not using it. I don't like how this is "built-in" for things like Rosetta Stone's newer stuff. It's built-in and is way too sparse to be of any use.
Ari, thanks. It's about money, which is the sad thing. They don't make enough to pay the full stack of job descriptions from CEO down to course writer. For this, it's just me and my wife. It's a lot of fun and we don't need much to live on! We don't have 4 layers of management yahoos to buy summer homes for. Tangent, but Rosetta Stone has something like 1800 employees -- What are they all DOING? I can't even imagine. Obviously not building quality material for Javanese or Bengali. Anyway, since we're tiny, we can do materials for these languages without paying some for a bunch of rich peoples' cars and houses. It's just incredibly fun work to do. Perhaps we should just build a simple site now for resources on these languages. We're doing tons of research anyway and there's probably some value in our notes and findings. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7015 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 14 of 40 05 November 2013 at 10:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I personally will pursue Indonesian, as my gateway to other Austronesian languages after I finish up French. This is of course at least five years from now. @Snoonan, I would suggest a poll be done for what languages are of interest. You can gage which languages are more viable, even though they are less studied. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3938 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 15 of 40 06 November 2013 at 11:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Purely audio SRS - very cool idea! I suppose the odds of having the tagalog program available by next may are very slim. But if it is...I'll be your first customer!
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| snoonan Triglot Newbie United States learningindones Joined 6045 days ago 23 posts - 56 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Indonesian | Message 16 of 40 07 November 2013 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I would agree that Indonesian a worthy first step into Austronesian languages... you get a lot of root words (I even noticed obvious cognates on our trip to Hawaii! Lima -> Lima (5 / hand), Waimea -> Air Merah (red water), Wailua - > Air dua (two water(s)). You also get quite a lot of Arabic and ton of Sanskrit for free. Not to mention a very quick jump to Malaysian and a bit of help in Tagalog. Fun language!
Actually, we hope to have started well before that. We may have material rolling out at that point. Though I can't say we can produce it as fast as it can be consumed! Happy to share whatever we have at that point, though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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