Can you learn a language from Gutenberg / Archive.org?

[Random Review]

I'd say from what I've tried that, if you include the free, legal audiobooks of the Sami Rohr library, which IIRC can also be found on archive.org, then for literary Yiddish (which I guess must sound like Jane Austin to a modern Yiddish speaker), it's not only possible, but maybe actually the best way. There was a guy on the old uztranslations site that linked to some great (free, legal) stuff on there. Wish I could remember some of it.

Disclaimer: I'm a perpetual dabbler in this language, so my opinion may be way off.

[Axon]

I've downloaded a ton of different Internet Archive books for learning different languages, mostly Chinese varieties. They tend to be written for people with 19th century attention spans and, often, the fire of evangelism motivating them to learn the language. Many of the works of J. Dyer Ball (a European who grew up speaking Cantonese, Hakka, and English) are available. Cantonese has changed faster than many other languages, but his textbooks are very complete with English, Written Cantonese, romanization, and a word-by-word translation.

There are also a number of books for learning 19th century French and German, often through very extensive dialogues or passages that resemble modern "natural method" courses today.

(e.g. pinyin for Chinese, while not complete in itself, an older treatise on Chinese usage would be that much more difficult to follow in a different transliteration)

I'm curious what you find lacking about Pinyin?

[rdearman]

I'm curious what you find lacking about Pinyin?

I believe they mean that because Pinyin wasn't invented until the 1950's most Gutenberg books will not have PinYin versions available and would therefore be using some kind of pre-pinyin romanisation.

[David1917]

(e.g. pinyin for Chinese, while not complete in itself, an older treatise on Chinese usage would be that much more difficult to follow in a different transliteration)

I'm curious what you find lacking about Pinyin?

It would leave a learner struggling to learn how to differentiate the scores of homophones, and require translations even at advanced levels when you should be able to read somewhat freely. If you see tā yào yào, you would think of the many yào those could be (though reasonably guess that the first one is 要), but if you see 他要药, you know exactly that "he needs medicine." I think pinyin is a useful tool for teaching and typing, but for actually learning Chinese, I don't see how it can be less frustrating than just learning how to read. Like with the other caveats I mentioned, if a learner has other resources then a pinyin-only course (like FSI or Trubner's Colloquial) might be a useful supplement. A pre-pinyin course would be the same, and probably expose you to some pre-revolutionary usage, you'd just have to learn another new transcription system.

[Axon]

It would leave a learner struggling to learn how to differentiate the scores of homophones, and require translations even at advanced levels when you should be able to read somewhat freely. If you see tā yào yào, you would think of the many yào those could be (though reasonably guess that the first one is 要), but if you see 他要药, you know exactly that "he needs medicine." I think pinyin is a useful tool for teaching and typing, but for actually learning Chinese, I don't see how it can be less frustrating than just learning how to read. Like with the other caveats I mentioned, if a learner has other resources then a pinyin-only course (like FSI or Trubner's Colloquial) might be a useful supplement. A pre-pinyin course would be the same, and probably expose you to some pre-revolutionary usage, you'd just have to learn another new transcription system.

Oh, I thought you were implying that Pinyin wasn't adequate for representing the sounds of Mandarin! I agree with you, though there are some people who are very vocal about teaching only through Pinyin for the first few years of study.

[David1917]

Oh, I thought you were implying that Pinyin wasn't adequate for representing the sounds of Mandarin! I agree with you, though there are some people who are very vocal about teaching only through Pinyin for the first few years of study.

I went ahead and edited the original post to add in a note to the effect that it would be a major problem if the course were ONLY in a transcription, pinyin or otherwise. As far as teaching only Pinyin for the first few years (!) I would be astounded to see a comparison where those students studying pinyin for 2 years came out speaking better than those who studied characters for 2 years.

[MorkTheFiddle]

A member of this forum has put together a lot of visual and audio materials for Latin, and a lot (most? all?) of it comes from or is based on materials from archive.org. He as created so much material that it would take years to get through all of it, and it seems impossible that using it would not lead to a substantial improvement in one's Latin. However, I cannot speak from experience, because I have sampled only a small part of it. The member runs a for-profit business out of his materials, so I shan't mention his name.

Personally I have downloaded dozens of materials relating to Ancient Greek: literature, grammars and commentaries. The downside of such pdf's is the images used to make them can be very difficult to render into regular text. However, there is free software called gImageReader https://sourceforge.net/projects/gimagereader/ or that does a decent job of the OCR. (Unfortuneately the app does not always function. Right now my copy of it is on the fritz.) There is a thread about the process started by Gergian on Textkit here: https://www.textkit.com/greek-latin-forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=67977&p=196471&hilit=ocr#p196471

My two cents.

[zenmonkey]

Along with Gutenberg / Archive.org there are some other sites with public domain ebooks, check out the list here:

https://ebookfriendly.com/free-public-d ... s-sources/