I found this great site for Portuguese content. I wonder if we should contact them to ask for permission to record their content.
I would also like to find sites with downloadable text on Portuguese or Brazilian history. Any ideas?
The same is true for other languages. Please let us know of any good sites out there that members can import from, or that we might be able to record and load into LingQ.
It seems really interesting. But I was wondering about authorship rights. From what I could get, he copies a lot of texts or fragments from his personal books and put them on the Internet. For some authors there is their personal email, so I suppose they agreed with this copy. But try Monteiro Lobato and you will see the owners of his authorship rights asked for the removal of his texts.
Could these texts be considered as citations? Do you remember I proposed something similar to you? What are the limits for citations?
…
I guess all we can is ask. I guess they could just give us samples. We have samples of modern audio books, with texts, in the English section of LingQ. Mostly we are limited to out of copyright books from he 19th century.
I’ve been searching a bit on Portuguese History and the websites that work don’t have much material… But I think if we search for particular subjects we can find a lot, it just depends on what you want to find? What would you like us to find in particular?
I happen to be interested in history. If I am learning a language, reading a out the history of the country is motivating. If there are sites with articles or histories of Portugal and Brazil would be of history. If we are able to record some of these texts so much the better.
Conversely if we find popular Podcasts we can approach them to transcribe their podcasts for them.
One more consideration. If theses sites are popular or influential it increases the chance that they might notice LingQ and talk about us, which will generate traffic.
So it is a matter of two birds with one stone…content and trafic.
I think this is a rather good site… At least the best until now, and I’ve already searched a lot.
Have you tried the wikipedia?
I’m not sure this link will work properly. You can also try to use google with “wikipedia portugues” and then search inside it “historia brasil”.
Wikipedia has the advantage of being free, so anyone can read it and put the audio and text at lingq.
And if you also want to listen and watch tv in Portuguese, you can go to the site of RTP (Radiotelevisão Portuguesa), that is a tv channel. There you can find content that goes from football to general news to programmes focusing on culture and literature and art and that all.
This site was excellent.
If we can get the odd narration of this that would be great. I do not think we need to bother asking them. The Wikipedia site did not have much but if we can find a site with an introduction to the History of Brazil that would be great.
Do you think I can record it without asking them, and then just put a link to their site?
I think we often get a standard bureaucratic answer from these sites.
In this case, I suggest we start putting some of these up, acknowledge the source with a link, and after we have five episodes we stop. The we wait a month or two and contact them and let them know what we have done. They can then either leave the five as free publicity for them and tell us to do no more, or they can agree to let us do more, or they can tell us to take them down.
Ok, then I’ll work on that. I’ll find one and record the audio… But I think the articles are too big and maybe we should divide them into some parts…
Pedro,
I think that 3-5 minutes is the ideal length for these. It usually makes for a text that is easy to study. If people want to listen for longer they can download a number of them and listen one after the other.
Ok, I’ll work on that.
Steve asked about “good sites out there that members can import from”:
I was wondering if you know about Ilya Frank’s websites in Russian: http://www.franklang.ru/
(Мультиязыковой проект Ильи Франка. Всё для освоения иностранных языков)
in German:
http://www.german.franklang.ru/ and for English speakers:
http://english.franklang.ru/
You’ll find innumerable texts and text passages to download for free (I don’t know about copy-right issues) as well as links to other websites in many languages.
Another website I have downloaded mp3 excerpts of audiobooks in Russian from is
http://www.ruslania.com/language-1/context-97/entity-2.html
They offer Sample mp3 files of about 2 minutes for some of their audio books.
Actually, now I’m a bit lost because I don’t know what to choose… Good parts of the site talk a lot about King son of King etc… or the river west of mountain east of ocean etc… and I don’t think if that a helps a lot…
When I have some time I will select some articles and let you know what I would like to hear.
Ok, that will make it easier.