FSI Content for many LingQ languages!

Content Forum
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Hi all,

I’ve recently uploaded quite a bit of Finnish content that was originally created by the Foreign Service Institute, in America.

Many of the former courses are available at the above site, and according to the site they are all in the public domain. I haven’t found anything that would suggest otherwise, nor have I found any mention of the courses having any copyright attached to them. For more information, visit this thread on the site’s forum:- http://bit.ly/yhAzy9

I strongly suggest you check out some of these courses, and if you’re interested, you could look at importing and sharing parts of them as lessons on LingQ (especially for languages whose LingQ libraries are rather empty).

For LingQ’s languages, the site has content in Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, German, Italian, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish.

There is also content for Greek and Hebrew, in case they are added in the near future. I also just noticed that there is a 150 audio file course for Swahili, in case anyone is interested (although the sound quality didn’t seem to be great).

It would be a great way to contribute content onto LingQ if someone could upload the relevant content for languages whose LingQ libraries are not very developed (e.g. Korean, Swedish, Turkish, Arabic, Czech). I think it’s best if a native speaker or a relatively advanced learner uploads them, because it involves editing the audio files and cutting out the relevant dialogs (or readings), and then finding the matching transcript in the PDF. This is not that easy to do in a language one is not familiar with.

I created about 200 lessons from the 14 audio files in Finnish, and I’d say it took me about 10-20 hours (not including uploading them, or any translations that I have done). But I’d say that I’m quite meticulous, so it can probably be done a lot quicker.

If anyone intends to work on the content for any of these languages, perhaps we could let each other know here so that two people don’t put in time on the same content?

What do others think?

2

I really don’t like the style of the FSI courses, but the dialogue content is really great and can be used without needing to focus on the drilling side of things.

You’re right though, they are public domain works as they were created by United States government workers.

There is one problem for several of the languages: the quality of the audio. Perhaps it would be a good thing to have the dialogues rerecorded by native speakers if possible/required.

I’d happily type up the Hebrew course at some point. (As the pdfs are all in image format).

3

I did some research and looked at the German courses. Unfortunately the recordings have a comment that they should not be used on commercial sites. This excludes the audios from LingQ.

My idea is to take the texts, modernize them and rerecord them. But it will take some time to do this and to find someone who helps me with the recordings.

4

@Vera
Ich helfe Dir gerne bei den Aufnahmen!