Rdearman 2016-24 You Can't Have Your Kate and Edith Too.

[rdearman]

Well I did another episode of Roger the little dragon today. It only took 2 hours and tastyonions only found a 1/4 of a page full of mistakes. So there seems to be some improvement. I realise it is painful to read, but it is helping me consolidate the things I'm doing on Kwiziq and the grammar book which I've dragged out of the bookshelf to read.

I like the look of iguanamon's challenge of learning a language using free & legal resources. The objective is only A1 or A2 touristy land and I've a couple of countries I intend to visit soon where knowing a little of the local lingo might be useful. I've been considering:

• Setswana
• Dutch
• Czech
• Cornish (Not really required to visit Cornwall)
• Japanese
• Indonesian
• Modern Greek

I actually own courses for Dutch, Japanese and Greek but wouldn't be able to use them, which sucks.

[iguanamon]

The objective is only A1 or A2 touristy land and I've a couple of countries I intend to visit soon where knowing a little of the local lingo might be useful. I've been considering:

• Setswana
• Dutch
• Czech
• Cornish (Not really required to visit Cornwall)
• Japanese
• Indonesian
• Modern Greek

I actually own courses for Dutch, Japanese and Greek but wouldn't be able to use them, which sucks.

I'm not letting you off with A1! You need to make A2 happen.

The challenge would be to keep to all free and legal materials and learn the language to at least A2 level tested by an agreed upon test, probably dialang and/or DLI. Of course, most languages won't have a reliable test, so, participants should test themselves honestly using the CEFR criteria.

Oh yeah, you've got 36 weeks to make it happen from when you start.

[rdearman]

But it is picking one !!! (Whiny voice here)

[rdearman]

OK a bit of research for resources in the languages I'm tempted by for the FLC.

• Setswana - There is actually more than I thought resourcewise. One phrase book at my local library, Peace Corps course, and some miscellasious stuff. I wouldn't bother with the phrase book, so this could be done hard-core FLC.
• Dutch - Crazy amounts of courses at my local library. There were actually 10 pages of courses and grammar books, etc. I didn't realise Dutch was so popular here. Easy access to radio stations, podcasts, etc, and Gutenberg books 700+.
• Czech - 6 pages of books, courses, grammar, etc at the local library, 10 Gutenberg books, podcasts and other stuff available.
• Cornish (Not really required to visit Cornwall) - Very little resources outside what is provided on the Cornish website I listed elsewhere and 2 books at the library.
• Japanese - 11 pages of books, courses, grammar, etc at the local library, 22 Gutenberg books, podcasts and other stuff available.
• Indonesian - 1 course, some books, nothing at Gutenberg.
• Modern Greek -6 pages of books, courses, grammar, etc at the local library, and Gutenberg books 400+.

Interestingly my library provides free access to a language learning site called transparent.com which has courses for all those languages except Setswana and Cornish. So if anyone is interested to see if your library is included you can do a postcode/zipcode search. https://www.transparent.com/libraries/l ... nline.html (Must remember to post this for Reineke)

So it would appear that for people with a library card the world is your oyster.

[IronMike]

Did you also see the Kernewek dre Lyther website for an excellent Cornish course? I did the first level and loved it. Helped that I did it with a tutor.

[smallwhite]

> Modern Greek ... Gutenberg books 400+.

There was some spelling reform kind of thing and old books look quite different. I don't know the details. The current spelling has only 1 accent mark per word in ~99% of the words, and 2 in the remaining ~1%. The oldest resource I've used was Cortina from Eric's (?) yoyuk (?) site, and it had non-current spelling. I used chapters 11 to 20 I think and it was excellent except for the spelling. All the TY books are good. Lonweb has audio.

[rdearman]

> Modern Greek ... Gutenberg books 400+.

There was some spelling reform kind of thing and old books look quite different. I don't know the details. The current spelling has only 1 accent mark per word in ~99% of the words, and 2 in the remaining ~1%. The oldest resource I've used was Cortina from Eric's (?) yoyuk (?) site, and it had non-current spelling. I used chapters 11 to 20 I think and it was excellent except for the spelling. All the TY books are good. Lonweb has audio.

I've already discarded Greek actually. I have a couple of courses and some grammar books for Greek, so I'll leave that one for later. I briefly considered Cantonese.

[Cavesa]

http://www.mluvtecesky.net
This one looks similar to http://slovake.eu

Duolingo Czech looks really good. It might be better than some of their courses for the bigger languages, the team seems to have made a very good job, taking their time has paid off. In this case, the low popularity of Czech might be an advantage, as there is little motivation for Duolingo to dumb it down to get more public (I've heard they've been changing the German course ).

http://www.mozaika.eu/category/zdarma-cviceni-online/ some graded blog articles

http://www.studyczech.cz/cs/zdroje-pro-studium-cestiny/
here is an interesting list, including sites with video and audio

http://www.mojecestina.cz/
this is for native children, but I think some of the exercises may be useful to foreign learners too.

http://slovnik.seznam.cz is one of the good choices for an online dictionary
http://forvo.com (I might be a Captain Obvious here)

public domain ebooks (Gutenberg would make you think there is nothing ):
http://www.sesity.net/elektronicka-knihovna.php these are books that tend to be obligatory in schools, mostare public domain. I am not sure about a few, but most clearly are. You can start with Malý princ (Le petit prince), or something else you already know. Out of the originally Czech books here, I recommend Čapek and Poláček as very pleasant reads, even though not necessarily the easiest. Nothing is probably easier there than Malý princ, a very common choice of learners of various languages.
http://www.databook.cz/e-knihy-zdarma
many more books, not just the obvious school choices, including stuff like the Arthur Conan Doyle translations. There are also contemporary authors, who agreed to make their works available for free, but I don't know whether they are good.


Warning:don't use this http://www.allysatis.org/ficheeleve/ele ... langaff=73
Google offered it, there is not much to do, but the little there is includes tons of mistakes. Exactly the kind of resource I warned against on the free challenge page, the creators count on people not finding out.

[rdearman]

Thanks Cavesa. Well I'm going to go for the FLC challenge in Setswana and Czech. I thought about this a lot and got some really excellent advice from Expugnator about how to rotate between languages. I've decided that I'm going to touch on 5 languages over the next little while in rotation. By rotation I mean doing some work with each language everyday. I'm going to focus on fixing my problems with Italian and French grammar and spend a bit more time with some actual course & grammar books. As opposed to just sitting around watching TV with French sub-titles turned on. I'm going to try to do all 4 activities (reading, writing, listening, speaking) in all 5 languages, 7 days a week.

I know some people will not approve and think I should focus on one language, but hey, what is life if you're not going to made some mistakes once in awhile. I have no intention of going further than A2 at best in Czech or Setswana but time will tell. I'm sure that I can make progress in Italian, French and Mandarin while doing a daily rotation, since adds up to more time than I have been doing with sporadic binges of learning. I am going to declare a change, I'm going to be more systematic, more pedantic and less lazy.

I haven't actually worked out a schedule yet, but had an outline plan which Expugnator kindly provided, so I need to flesh that out when I gather up the resources and understand what I have to work with. So wish me luck, heaven knows I'll need it.

[Brun Ugle]

Can we see your schedule? Or Expug’s outline plan?