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LR and specific languages.

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Random review
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5581 days ago

781 posts - 1310 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German

 
 Message 1 of 1
04 November 2013 at 8:18pm | IP Logged 
It's a great method and, almost more importantly, a very enjoyable method; but every language I've tried it
with seems to have one big problem when it comes to LR and that problem is different for every one of
those languages. Don't get me wrong, they're not insurmountable obstacles (indeed I've had great
experiences with this method in both Spanish and German and at least a little joy with Modern Greek); but
they do waste a lot of time and cause a degree of frustration for the person trying to do this on a
shoestring and not anticipating each obstacle. So humour me: if every language has one obstacle it puts
in the way of the person trying to use LR to get acquainted with it, what (in your experience) is it for the
languages you have tried. I'll go first (in what follows, "X" stands for some book you'd really be excited to
read):

Spanish: computer voices. You think you just found the Spanish audiobook for X, yipee! You spend several
hours downloading it, you put it on your MP3 player, this is going to be great...and it's Jorge or some
other horrible computer voice (yes they have names, which can catch you out- "oh it must be read by a
real person because it says it's some guy called Jorge" lol). Always search for "voz humana" when looking
for
Spanish audiobooks.

Geman: the time wasted and feeling of frustration is the same, but their annoying habit is not conputer
voices but constantly producing abridged versions of everything. Always search for "ungkürzt" when
looking for German audiobooks.

European Portuguese/ Modern Greek: I don't know why, but good luck finding any interesting audiobooks
online. The best option at the time of writing is the stuff at jw.org. It all depends whether you can stomach
it for the requisite number of hours (I find it a little bit unpleasant tbh and ultimately LR is supposed to be
pleasurable, though it's certainly very generous of them to put it all up there for free in so many
languages). Happily, there's a ton of good stuff for the Brazilian dialect of Portuguese.

Mandarin Chinese: I think some of the translations aren't very accurate, they definitely aren't for Harry
Potter. Thanks to the hard work of a native Chinese speaker calling herself "Miss China" (who apparently
learned English using LR!). You can find what you need
here
Some links are dead, so a bit of ingenuity my be required. Many (plenty for LR) are still active at the time of
writing or at least they were when I last checked, which wasn't too long ago.

Disclaimer: I'm struggling badly to get serious with Mandarin (I'm a bit intimidated tbh) and have yet to
seriously attempt LR or any other method with it,
though I have got some materials together and had a bit of a play with them.

Yiddish: if ever a language was tailor made for LR, you'd have thought it would be Yiddish. You can easily
find tons of reputedly excellent literature online free (and legal!) in both audiobook and print form, e.g.
here
here
or especially
here

So far I've had very little luck finding English translations for this stuff online, though.

Edited by Random review on 04 November 2013 at 9:28pm



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