Publicly-accessible university archives of recorded language-learning audio (including Burmese!)

[Zegpoddle]

I was reading the Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma) this morning when I came across this tidbit in an appendix near the end of the book:

"There aren't many study resources available for learning Burmese. The best is Burmese By Ear by John Okell of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, comprising a series of audio recordings plus accompanying book in PDF format, all of which can be downloaded for free at:

http://www.soas.ac.uk/bbe

." (end of quotation)

Wow, you NEVER know when or where you're going to find a reference to a valuable-but-obscure language-learning resource, especially one that's online. The openness and diffuseness of the internet is at once it greatest strength and weakness. Precious stuff can be hiding anywhere! (Any language-learning material that includes free text, free audio, and a free answer key is, in my opinion, precious, especially for less-commonly-studied languages.)

There is some other good material on that SOAS site, too, but not all of it is obvious. I would never have found the set of Burmese materials without being given the /bbe suffix for that site. Just clicking around on the visible links on that site would not have led me to that page. (I tried that later and couldn't find my way back to Okell's audio files.) This is actually a common way to store files on a website while making them hard to find to those not "in the know." It's not as strong as password protection, but it's surprising how easily you can restrict material by simply adding a slash and an extra string of letters to the end of a website URL and then only providing the "extra" letters to those whom you want to have access to that secret page.

All of which has gotten me thinking...

Are there other university-based websites that post language-learning materials (especially audio files that correspond to a textbook) that are accessible to anyone who visits that site? I don't mean college or university sites that require a login and password to access their materials, which is what 99% of these institutions do (and understandably so, since they probably don't want to receive a "cease and desist" letter from a publisher informing them that they are violating copyright by making the audio files to Deutsch Na Klar available to any and all comers rather than just the students who are actually enrolled at their school). I mean the 1% (or probably less) of institutions that post such materials for anyone and everyone to listen to and perhaps download, no password required.

A good example would be the Recorded Materials Archive at Indiana University at Bloomington's Center for Language Technology, found at:

http://www.iu.edu/~celtie/catalog1.html

I firmly believe in not looking a gift horse in the mouth, so I don't want to speculate too extensively about the reasons why a university would post such material for the general public (as opposed to just their own students) to access. Perhaps the material is no longer in print, or the publisher is defunct and no one is actively defending the copyright, or, as seems to be the case with Okell's Burmese textbook, the material was never commercially published in the first place, or the school wants to perform a public service by making the files available to everyone, or the author is retired or deceased or not interested in wringing every bloody cent of profit possible out of the materials he or she has written...Whatever. There could be any number of reasons. We don't need to know them.

As an independent language learner (and a really stingy one who loves free materials as long as they are high-quality), my only interest, quite selfishly, is to find out what else is out there for the taking. What other schools have posted free resources online that I would never know about unless someone directed me to them? Not everything shows up in a Google search. That doesn't mean it isn't out there. There must be other colleges and universities whose language departments have posted learning resources online for anyone to access...but how could we identify them, short of visiting the website of each of those departments one-by-one, which would be tedious beyond endurance and a huge time sink?

Is there a unified listing anywhere of such "free for the taking" no-firewall university language websites?

Is that a list we could or should put together in this forum, by reporting when we find something like the Burmese site I discovered today through the grace of a travel guidebook?

Is there any interest in such a list?

(I'm limiting this inquiry to college and university sites because [a] most of those institutions have language departments, [b] they are therefore the likeliest sources of quality materials posted online, especially audio files, and [c] freely-available materials from non-academic sites are easy to find and generally not as high-quality as the textbooks and materials that college students tend to be assigned in their language courses. This is of course a generalization with some exceptions, but I find it to be true for the most part.)

[Cainntear]

I was reading the Rough Guide to Myanmar (Burma) this morning when I came across this tidbit in an appendix near the end of the book:

"There aren't many study resources available for learning Burmese. The best is Burmese By Ear by John Okell of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, comprising a series of audio recordings plus accompanying book in PDF format, all of which can be downloaded for free at:

http://www.soas.ac.uk/bbe

." (end of quotation)

Wow, you NEVER know when or where you're going to find a reference to a valuable-but-obscure language-learning resource, especially one that's online. The openness and diffuseness of the internet is at once it greatest strength and weakness. Precious stuff can be hiding anywhere! (Any language-learning material that includes free text, free audio, and a free answer key is, in my opinion, precious, especially for less-commonly-studied languages.)

There is some other good material on that SOAS site, too, but not all of it is obvious. I would never have found the set of Burmese materials without being given the /bbe suffix for that site. Just clicking around on the visible links on that site would not have led me to that page. (I tried that later and couldn't find my way back to Okell's audio files.)

Great find -- typing "language resources" in the search box brings up several cool sets of materials for various languages.