https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearni ... nd_a_very/Here are some big news. Mihalis is moving to the UK and changing his style of life for a bit more comfortable and with more focus on course making, which I hope will bring him a lot of happiness! Yep, priorities change with age and time, and it's a good thing.
TLDR of the long post and some of the discussion:
-going back from his idea of doing primarily the organisation work on a platform full of other creators making LT courses, possibly for the reasons we've already discussed here at length. He will primarily make content himself for now.
-he wants to focus on making as many Introductory courses as possible, no Complete courses
-he wants to somewhat return to the creation of languages in demand, looks like Arabic and Mandarin will be getting more content.
-no more commissioned courses, Swahili was too bad of an experience for him. Not even crowdfunding commissioning
-call for some sort of mass action to tell education ministries and faculty members "hey, LT is doing your work, make LT obligatory and replace everything with it", which I don't entirely understand.
Overall, I personally find it a bit sad, that he's going the "as many Introductory courses as possible" path (including learning the language just enough to make an Introductory course for it), rather than focus on Complete courses only, and on languages that matter to him, or his collaborators. But that's his right to choose. I am slightly disappointed, that there is no attempt at commissioning-crowdfunding (to pay him and also any collaborator he'd need). I would love to throw a bit of my money into making a Complete Lithuanian or Vietnamese or Farsi course, even if I am not likely to use it. But I guess here is a bit of my naivety: I have no clue, whether such a project would require like 30000 euro, or 100000 euro, I simply don't know.
Mihalis has given the LL community a lot already, so I hope he'll enjoy any path he chooses to take. I think his attempts to find completely new ways to run and finance his project are valuable to observe, even if it means observing also a lot of not really successful attempts. But we need people exploring the pros and cons of other ways than just climbing an academic ladder or getting hired by a publisher totally in control of your work.
People are also taking out the old "it's just Michel Thomas rip off" nonsense again. Really, if we are to think like this, then we'd have to consider all the CEFR based coursebooks but one as rip offs (most are in many ways very similar), all dictionaries but one as a rip off, all TY type coursebooks but one as a rip off. It is really sad that some people think that nothing partially new should continue on the path started by someone else and help it evolve and expand. And even when the MT publisher tried to get rid of LT, they didn't even go into the debate, they just tried to copyright the use of the pause button! Not really any method. So, no clue why this still gets brought up so much.
I am also a bit weirded out by the strong call for fans to start bothering "people whose work is Mihalis doing", like education ministries and such, and trying to push them to replace everything with LT
Not only because I think LT is excellent as one tool in the toolbox, but definitely not enough (and this will get worse, if he starts making only Introductory courses). You know, if I had the time and energy to contact my political representants now, I'd have a dozen other things on my mind (and trust me, I've already reached out once or twice, like many normal citizens). With something like Mihalis proposes, we'd just get to someone's spambox. And it is also both premature (hard to appeal to people worldwide, when all but one course are English based), and unreasonable. I think a bigger change would be achieved with simply staying out of the official education structure and focusing on offering content and promoting it. Thanks to the official certificates, you can learn a language any way you want and still get the official rewards (jobs, unis, etc), so the failures of school and politicians and bureaucrats are much less disastrous and much less worth the energy.
Disappointed to see that creator intends to concentrate on other intros rather than finish off some of the older courses like Italian which is c8yrs old. I'd have been quite happy to pay for a 'part 2' to finish off the course.