Paid listening resources and the problem of 'amateur' teachers

General discussion about learning languages
User avatar
Amandine
Orange Belt
Posts: 177
Joined: Tue Nov 02, 2021 8:45 am
Location: Sydney, Australia
Languages: English (N), French (B1/B2), Russian (B1), Romanian (A1, casual playing on Duolingo), Yiddish (ditto)
x 893

Re: Paid listening resources and the problem of 'amateur' teachers

Postby Amandine » Mon Dec 06, 2021 2:31 am

Of course to a significant degree what you’re paying for with any teacher or course is for someone to have done the grunt work for you and present the material in an appealing, user friendly way. As I said, the material is broken down into one day a week for a month so has a clear step by step to follow. So no its not some radically different grammar but many people will prefer a spoonful of sugar approach to just brute forcing through Grammaire Progressive Du Francais. The particular grammar points are used in the longer monologue so you get to see them in action. Personally, I like to have different people explain the same thing to me in lots of different ways so I do textbooks and also different youtubers and get it from different aspects.
In the Hugo case there’s a cap on enrolments to keep it manageable (I have no idea what but its usually only open to enrol for a week) I didn’t hang around in the community part of it much but he and his assistant were around there. I didn’t feel there was any misleading advertising about it being a personal lesson or anything.
0 x

BeaP
Green Belt
Posts: 405
Joined: Sun Oct 17, 2021 8:18 am
Languages: Hungarian (N), English, German, Spanish, French, Italian
x 1990

Re: Paid listening resources and the problem of 'amateur' teachers

Postby BeaP » Mon Dec 06, 2021 7:14 am

I've never paid for a French course, but I'm a subscriber at the moment of Vicente's (Spanish with Vicente youtube channel) 'Academia Online'. It's 12 Euros for a month, and for this price I can watch as many courses as I want. I mainly subscribed to it, because I wanted to support Vicente's work, as I'd learnt quite a lot from his free videos. The paid courses are similar to the free ones, but there are a lot of them arranged according to topics. Some examples are: Business Spanish, Subjunctive beginner and advanced, Linking words, Colloquial Spanish from TV shows. One course consists of around 10 video lessons (each one is 8-10 minutes long) and 2-3 exercises per lesson. If I have a question, I can leave a comment and ask for an explanation. I've watched some lessons so far, and I don't think it's anything indispensable. However, the price is fair, the explanations are clear and the presentation is interesting. I started to watch youtube because I've had the impression that I learn much better if something is presented to me by a teacher. (I understand everything from books, I just think that my memory works better if there is a teacher.) But one has to be very careful, because youtube can also turn into a huge waste of time: like videos mainly in English or lists of words and expressions without any context. You have to ask yourself the question all the time: do I watch this because it improves my knowledge or do I procrastinate with it with a calm conscience?
2 x

Cainntear
Black Belt - 3rd Dan
Posts: 3469
Joined: Thu Jul 30, 2015 11:04 am
Location: Scotland
Languages: English(N)
Advanced: French,Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Intermediate: Italian, Catalan, Corsican
Basic: Welsh
Dabbling: Polish, Russian etc
x 8665
Contact:

Re: Paid listening resources and the problem of 'amateur' teachers

Postby Cainntear » Fri Dec 10, 2021 4:14 pm

YouTube is a mess.

You could make the world's best video language course on YouTube and make no money whatsoever, because you need to get subscribers to get any income whatsoever, which means you have to keep releasing new content, even though that means churning out lower quality stuff.

Ad revenue is about $3-$5 per 1000 views. Let's say your videos are about 15 minutes each -- that's $12-$20 for an hour of video to 1000 people. Why do that if you can make twice as much money delivering the same content live to a single private student?

Making a good video is days of work... at least. The public sector Gaelic agency recently commissioned a series of videos for online study -- their budget was £500 per minute (and they're not known as a high budget operation!). To get the same from YouTube, you'll need to get 200,000-334,000 views.
Now of course even if they were to monetise on YouTube (which they won't, as they're a free service) they would likely not get that, because they're only making (IIRC) an hour of content per year, so they would be massacred by the algorithm and probably wouldn't even get the minimum number of subscribers needed to monetise.

Easy German has over a million subscribers, but it appears that even they have given up on YouTube ad revenue and switched to direct viewer funding via Patreon (I've clicked on half a dozen of their videos and only one gave an advert, which I'm assuming was an accident). They've got 6,566 patrons, and I don't know exactly how Patreon deals with levels across currencies -- it shows me £5 gbp as the minimum, which would suggest a monthly income of at least £32,830, or $43,413 (usd). SocialBlade reckons they'd only be making $630.00-$10,080.00 a month if they were using YouTube's ads, and that's before accounting for the fact that adverts would almost certainly reduce their viewing figures.

Patreon doesn't solve the problem, though, because if you're expecting people to pay month after month, you're still pushed to keep churning out more and more content so they're getting something for their money.

If I'm not mistaken, Easy German currently has 601 videos up -- no-one needs any more than that, do they? Yet judging by the numbering, they've done loads more than that, and they've taken lots of them down, although I don't know whether that's cos they didn't like them or they wanted to reupload in better quality.

Whatever -- they're generating content because they have to to survive, not because any human being actually benefits from it.

If you look at the very earliest videos you'll see that it started out as a typical beginners' channel, hence the name, but there's no way you can keep publishing videos month after month, year after year, if you're producing targeted lessons, so the only sensible decision is to do what they did and just harvest bucketloads of native chat and make voxpop videos exactly like they do at Easy German.


With smaller channels, what happens is that they buy into the idea that there's money to be made in YouTube, so they start creating, and slowly get increasingly desperate as nothing really happens, and they're dragged into a death spiral of being forced to generate more and more crap to continue to exist, with no time to account for quality or practical value.


Creating a YouTube channel to try to promote a commercial product or service is also something of a fool's errand, because you have to manage the channel as pretty much a full-time job to keep yourself being recommended by the algorithm, and then you're forked, because you either end up giving all your best stuff away for free or you risk making yourself look bad by sharing substandard stuff.


Easy German exists now because it was launched 6 years ago and built up momentum when it was possible to do so -- you really would struggle to make a similar channel now.
6 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: nagoyana, tiia and 2 guests