A language learners’ forum

leosmith wrote:Does anyone have any specific topic they want to see for Mandarin? And for that matter, any of the other languages we have in work? (no politics/sex/religion or corona though, haha )

- Funny stories from one's own childhood or a family member's childhood (My grandpa dropped out of college but he didn't want to admit it so he lived on a tent on campus for the rest of the semester...)

- Typical mistakes that foreigners make in the language, perceptions of one's own language difficulty compared to other languages, perceptions of what kind of foreigners learn it and why some are successful and others not

- Descriptions of one's living space or the places they go regularly

- How people's personal taste in media has changed over time and how it compares to broader trends (I used to listen to movie soundtracks but now ...)

- How music, movies, books in general have changed over time

- Anecdotes about the first time they used the Internet / mobile phones and how the technology has changed

- Comparing the general layouts and overall features of two cities (hometown vs university town, capital city vs other metropolis...)

- Habits they want to develop and why (I wish I could stop myself from sleeping through my alarm in the morning...)

- What it means to be "educated"

- Describe a time when someone else made a mistake and they had to fix it

-home/car disasters. the times a machine ate your money and gave you no coffee, something got stuck despite you pushing the right button, car broke down, door got stuck, heating didn't work. Extremely useful, extremely rarely covered in any material for learners. And often funny.

-clothes, shoes, their repairs etc. This seems to be a very unpopular topic. Because coursebooks just give you long and useless lists. But what type of shoes do you want, what qualities do you want from the skirt you're looking for, etc. Again, extremely useful, extremely rarely covered.

-food. Not the stupid list in every beginner's coursebook. But describing something people like or dislike, what it is, how it is different from something else. Basically, that's normal Italian smalltalk To help people learn about stuff that really is in the local shops and restuarants.

This looks like a great tool! Hindi would be a great language to include. Of course, I'm suggesting it because I'm a Hindi learner, but also it is a very large language with a relatively small selection of learning tools.

Excellent suggestions all! I should be able to add most of those topics to our lists. Regarding language(s) to add next, I think I'll create a poll on LT for that. I'll post a link here after I set it up.

If you'd like to nominate a language to vote on for the next batch of 100 conversations, you may do so here (1 nomination per person).

leosmith wrote:If you'd like to nominate a language to vote on for the next batch of 100 conversations, you may do so here (1 nomination per person).

It's been a week, so voting has started here.

leosmith wrote:

leosmith wrote:If you'd like to nominate a language to vote on for the next batch of 100 conversations, you may do so here (1 nomination per person).

It's been a week, so voting has started here.

Congratulations to those who voted for German!

Do you have any plans to release the transcripts of the conversations in plain text? Your transcription of ~10 hours of relatively natural conversation in each language is something that doesn't show up every day, especially for languages with fewer resources. The full transcripts could be very valuable for linguistics research.

These transcripts could also be made into targeted vocab lists or flashcards with audio, at least after somebody puts in the work to align the audio and text. I'm imagining something like Spoon Fed Chinese, where each phrase is turned into a card and then the cards are arranged by lexical and syntactic difficulty.

Axon wrote:Do you have any plans to release the transcripts of the conversations in plain text?

No plans.

I'm pleased to announce that we have completed 4 more languages (Tagalog, Mandarin, Spanish, Russian), have 3 more in work (French, Cebuano, Thai) and one in recruiting (German). Shout out to the teams for all their hard work!