In the last 2-3 months I have been expanding the library for Icelandic quite a lot. Got permissions for quite a bit of material from different authors, found university lessons, added another children’s book and translated/recorded the Greetings and goodbyes and Eating out courses and got LingQ to publish them as well.
Now, as the picture shows, I have permission from RÚV - the national broadcasting service in Iceland, to publish their podcasts on LingQ. Not all their podcasts have transcriptions, but fortunately quite a few of them do.
We are definitely getting there with the Icelandic library. Even now, it is much bigger than the Norwegian library was when I began learning Norwegian here on LingQ in 2020 for example.
Depending on how certain things end up, I might also put an even bigger effort into the library in 2023.
This is exactly the difficulty I am faced with when building the library. In general, in any language, the most interesting material is often copyrighted. The smaller the language, the less public domain material there generally is and a lot of public domain material is old and the language used is quite different from modern language material. That is why I also have to get a lot of permissions from a lot of people and institutions, to get more interesting material into LingQ. I think I have been able to do well, getting material into LingQ, considering the situation.
One thing I was lucky in, is that the children of the author Heiður Baldursdóttir wanted all her works to be freely available to the public, so I could add two children’s books she wrote to LingQ, that were written in the late 80s or early 90s and thus have fairly modern language. It would be more interesting of course, if I had some novels for grown ups. I also just think there would ideally need to be dozens of novels in the library, for people to be able to use the LingQ library to become fluently literate.
I think you would mostly just have to import a lot of news and articles into LingQ, but then of course you need a premium account. It would really be ideal if one could go from beginner to fluently literate using only the LingQ library (which IMO is quite possible in French, Spanish, English etc but not so much the smaller languages).
Thanks! After you first posted about working on Icelandic for Lingq I was interested, but I was concerned on how to grow during the intermediate stage. I will have to figure out how to get an icelandic library card.
I bought a kobo and I can’t find any icelandic books on there for the life of me, such a shame
Thank you so much for doing this! Here’s another few modern ebooks that are freely available for download from the publisher (https://www.emma.is/rafbokalisti). I presume since they’re free to download, one would be free to upload them?
As you’re adding RÚV podacasts, one of the best ones for language learners is Ævar Vísindamaður. He speaks pretty clearly on a wide variety of topics.
The limitation is how ebooks have to have sound/read versions as well and audiobooks/podcasts have to have transcripts for me to add it to the library. You can only make content public in LingQ that has both text and sound. Individuals could of course import texts from ebooks that don’t have sound to LingQ for the private use. Sometimes I have written transcripts for sound/video or read public domain material for text, but it takes me quite a bit of time.
I recently came across the audio guides from Þjóðminjasafnið. Might they be interested in particpating, since they are an educational institution? Audio Guide | Þjóðminjasafn Íslands
