Monday, February 21, 2005

Added some reviews

Here finally are some of the reviews I've been wanting to include. The Barry Farber review and the great Destinos video program that Annenberg/CPB makes available for free online. I'm sort of focused on Spanish right now, so I'll include a review for the awesome French In Action when I'm more comfortable with my ability in Spanish and I begin to focus more on brushing up my French.

I've mentioned many times before how I think language learning materials ought to be free, now that the technology is available to actually do that with a minimal cost via the internet. I have an outline to do a tutorial with audio files for Esperanto. There are other, free materials on the internet (Kurso de Esperanto among others) that are very good and have audio. I think my niche would be to provide more exercises and practice for pronunciation and conversation. I've planned out short modules on particular topics to be downloaded in mp3 format with pdf text and written exercises. Someone suggested I should do this for Spanish and French too, but I'm not comfortable enough with those languages to do any audio myself. At least Esperanto has no native speakers, everyone learns it as a second language, so I'm much more comfortable doing my own audio for it. For those who don't know me that well, I am a musican with lots of recording equipment sitting around - my instrumental guitar music site will be along in a month or two.

I also expanded the Learning Tips page to include pages for Flashcards and Study Time.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Endangered Languages

I've gathered up a lot of resources for the Celtic languages. I'm still sorting through the resources for the Scandinavian tongues. I guess an 'Other Languages' page is coming soon, since I've finished up the basic pages for the most popular ones. The number of commercial products for these languages is woefully inadequate. I recently came across the number of languages on the planet, over 6000. Thousands of those are expected to die out in the next century. If I'm having trouble finding products to learn Irish or Swedish, both languages with millions of speakers, how can we expect to maintain interest in thousands of languages with only a handful of speakers?

There are a few online resources dedicated to documenting and preserving endangered languages. Otherlanguages is a blog dedicated to promoting awareness of endangered languages. Ogmios is an foundation for endangered languages. I recommend to anyone interested in languages to be aware of this problem and do something to contribute. Be part of the solution, not part of the problem.

I've always wanted to learn a Celtic language. I assumed it would be Irish, as I have some Irish ancestry, or Welsh because it fascinates me. But after becoming more aware of this endangered language problem, I've been thinking of Cornish. This language had a Near-Death Experience. It basically died, but due to a serious effort on the part of concerned citizens has seen a bit of a resurrection. There are only a few hundred fluent speakers and only a few thousand with some knowledge of it, but is still growing. Once I saw some Cornish I was kind of hooked. It looks to me as fascinating as Welsh. It will have to wait a little while for me, though. I need to iron out a few other languages before I start adding more.

The Learning Arabic page and Arabic resources page completes the most popular languages. I also added the Hebrew resource page.

Friday, February 04, 2005

More Additions

I just added a Japanese resource page and a Portuguese resource page. I didn't think that Portuguese would be one of the more popular languages, but the Portuguese page has been ranking high in the stats lately. Are a lot of people going to Brazil for Mardi Gras, or something? Is Carnival the Brazilian version of Mardi Gras? Someone clear me up on that please.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

I've finally added a Russianpage and a Russian resources page. I've found so many resources for Russian and other languages. Someday I'll have to go back and revamp all of these resource pages and add loads of entries for a lot of the languages. I firmly believe that when you have a number of different approaches to the same basic information, you'll be able to pick the one that most appeals to you, that helps you 'get it' the best. I guess that's all part of Barry Farber's 'multiple attack' approach. Whatever you want to call it, it works.

Also added a German Resource page and the Learn Hebrew page, with a resource page to follow ASAP.