I don’t feel comfortable at all about promoting religion, but the bible is certainly the most translated book in the world, and according to Arguelles:
“Apart from the wide variety of languages offered, these scriptural recordings are special for another reason, namely their audio quality. Rather than being simply read by a single voice, the great majority of them are performed in a lively and exciting narrative style as audio-dramas by up to 180 different voices, accompanied by tastefully appropriate theme music.”
The only bad sides of it is that the transcription doesn’t come with it… but I guess it won’t be to hard to find, and also, we are not allowed to share it on LingQ because of the copyright.
Anyway, content is content…
When I said that I don’t feel comfortable at all about promoting religion, what I really meant is that I’m an atheist, a non-beliver, a godless person or call that the way you want… Anyway, maybe one day, I will read and listen to the Quran to learn arabic (I’ll probably also do it just to learn a couple of lines and manipulate a few muslims… and hopefully, make them abandon their fate. - I know, I’m so evil! haha!)
I read once that the literacy amongst the rural Welsh in the eighteenth/nineteenth century was unusually high. The reason was that, when the bible was translated into Welsh, the priests made sure that it was freely available to Welsh-speakers. For many people it was the first book printed in their language that they had ever owned, and they learned to read from it. Many of the stories were already very familiar to them from church services and Sunday school.
I was going to suggest the Koran for reading and listening practice, as it seems to be widely available in many languages and formats. I haven’t seen the Torah in any of the languages I am studying, although I think the Book of Mormon may be fairly easy to get hold of. There’s a LOT of material inside those covers, if you are interested in reading it…
I must admit that, when it comes to reading very long books, I’m more of a Lord of the Rings person.
@ blindsite: I agree that the satanic bible is probably more interesting to listen to!
Anyway, I downloaded the Mandarin Chinese version to know what it look like, I must say it’s not so bad; all chapters are recorded on different audio files of about 4-5 minutes each, and, at least for this drama version, it’s not painful to listen to, surprisingly! As Arguelles said, it’s good quality.
I started importing parts of the Union version of the Chinese new testament today, and I found out that this version is part of the public domain. I wonder what is the law regarding audio record of books like that. I guess I should just ask FCBH permission to use their content on lingQ. Do you think something like that would be ok?
“I am a member of LingQ.com, an online language learning community. I very much enjoy the Mandarin Chinese Audio Drama New Testament (Union Version), and I would like to share it with members at LingQ. All of our content can be downloaded and shared, free of charge, by anyone who registers at LingQ, although some learning services at LingQ require the payment of a fee.
Would you be willing to give me permission to share your content. I will of course acknowledge the source with a link to your site.
You can register at LingQ free of charge and check it out.”
“hehe they should also make “the god delusion” is 400 languages :)”.
I have listened through the original recording of it made by R.Dawkins himself and his wife, and enjoyed their reading from the Old Testement (= Torah in that case) and the New Testement a lot !
!