Speakeasy wrote:Thank you for dropping a line. Still, we’re worlds apart! Whenever I happen upon a set of vintage language-learning materials, irrespective of the target language involved, my limbs begin to tremble like those of a dope fiend.Adrianslont wrote: I can’t say these look very inviting when you look inside and find only typed vocabulary lists ... The Australian military has its own language school and also members of the defence forces who are on track to become officers but attending regular universities who sometimes study Indonesian.
As to the RAAF Indonesian Course (1982), the description provided by the eBay seller reads: “folders containing the course notes and word lists”, which I would generally understand to mean the basic sentences, short dialogues, glossaries, and notes used in support of the classroom instruction which took place at the RAAF Language School. The breadth of the collection of course books in the photograph suggests a fairly substantial introductory course. However, as the Australian military does not have resources matching those of the American military, I doubt that their language courses are as in-depth as those of the DLI. I would go even further by surmising that audio recordings were probably not prepared to accompany the course books covered by this offer.
Had these manuals been prepared for a German course, I would have snapped them up (OCD). The RAAF Indonesian Course manuals have got to be better than any contemporary materials (sic: a hard-and-fast tenet of any true vintage language-learning materials fetishist). It is beyond me how you can resist the temptation.
Yes, one would hope and expect that they contain more than wordlists in the 17 volumes - but the seller didn’t really make it clear and only showed the wordlists - bad sales techniques!
Audio I think is a “maybe” rather than a “probably not” I am aware of a couple of older Australian produced materials, early 1970s, that had audio. And they were professionally published unlike the military materials.
Because of Australia’s proximity to Indonesia we probably have a greater interest in learning Indonesian and more locally made resources than pretty much everywhere else - though I know that interest has declined in high schools in recent years. And some key academics in James Sneddon and George Quinn. My daughter did two years of Indonesian at Sydney Uni recently and they used their own books. The Air Force materials may be great - who knows?
Sneddon has a grammar reference book and and a workbook that I should probably actually use - but I stubbornly stick to my preferred approach of cartoons, talk shows and podcasts. And visits to Indonesia.
I kind of understand your “fetish” - I like lots of old things myself, mainly popular American music as far back as the 1920s. I’m reluctant to spend lots of money on it, though - especially when no effort has been made to convince me of the quality.
As an aside I actually met three teachers from the Defence Force Language School at a conference about five years ago (just prior to my adult Indo language learning journey) - I spent some time with them at a conference on online learning (no particular language learning focus). One taught Indonesian and Malay, another taught Dari and similar and I can’t remember the third. Nice bunch. They showed me what they were doing online and from memory it was interesting and engaging but had a homemade look about it (like the above-mentioned airforce materials) and I’m pretty sure was a complement to a face to face class.