I forgot to mention that I import most of these contents into LingQ and create LingQs like mad. See my profile.
I believe in what we are doing, and I greatly appreciate the wonderful content that has been created by a number of our creative members. I believe that anyone can start a language from scratch at LingQ. Yet many of those people will also want to buy a more traditional starter book to get over the beginner period.
There are also people who need to be introduced to our system very gently, with the kind of help that they are used to getting. Once they get more confidence in their ability to learn, they will also thrive here, I believe. That is why we have the Linguaphone PDQ lessons.
I have to congratulate Steve for your post. Although he suffered a lot of criticisms, he always was ready to read our posts and answered all of them clearly, and being honest with us, who want to see this comunity growing more and more, but without escape from your main purpose: let a learner to make your own path.
In my view it would be necessary to change the name "LingQ-Store "into “Store”.
So nobody really believes, the commercial lessons , represented the ideas of Steve resp.of LingQ.
Ich persönlich würde den Namen “LingQ-Store” in “Store” wechseln.
Damit niemand auf die Idee kommen kann ,die gekauften Lektionen würden die Ideen von Steve resp.Lingq. vertreten.
Aus meiner Sicht ist eine klare Abgrenzung wirklich nötig!!! auch aus Respekt zu all den vielen "member created"Lektionen.
I would second Jolanda’s point that content being sold (as opposed to given away freely) is being sold by the content providers, not by LingQ themselves, and therefore have no especial LingQ endorsement.
I could presumably choose to make a selection of my skyblueteapot lessons available only though the store. They wouldn’t, from LingQ’s perspective, be any better (and would have passed through no additional quality assurance procedures) than my other lessons, they are just the ones I’m trying to make a few bucks on.
Alsuvi said: “…Yeah, sure, the folks here are very hostile towards this wonderful new courses because of that. I’m really frightened. I was planning on finishing paying my mortgage this year with the insanely huge amount of points I’m getting from LingQ with my lessons and now my plans will be ruined. You hit the nail on the head. You got me, this is exactly the point of all this discussion!”
Two points Alsuvi:
1.) I would be wary of sarcasm in a foreign language - it can be a little hard to carry off.
2.) Assuming you are indeed offering a completely neutral opinion of these courses, the next question would be: how valuable is a review done by someone who has never used the course and who has only seen the first unit?
1 I thought Alsuvi’s post was quite funny.
2 No matter the quality of the dialogues, filling them with teaching language and background noise means less target language content per minute. As simple as that. I think many agree with me.
Rank, as far as I know, sarcasm at LingQ is allowed, especially if it is in a foreign language. We have a long tradition about it at LingQ.
I think what Alsuvi means is, when you buy a “premium” content, it should be at least as good as an average free lesson in the library.
In my opinion the first lesson which I had the opportunity to check doesn’t demonstrate that. HOWEVER, it’s up to the user to buy it or not, and up to LingQ to decide which is the best strategy to manage the commercial lessons, and I have no complaints about it.
The only issue would be that maybe users don’t have enough information about how the lessons are (method used, there is or not explanations, etc.). There should be a much better explanation especially if the approach differs a lot of what users can be used to.
Last, but not least, we all should keep in mind that LingQ has grown (besides other reasons) thanks to many people’s free contributions (translations, content, promotion, …).
I do. Jeff, it is almost like you could read my mind…
I enjoyed the sarcasm too. Although I think Alsuvi’s lessons are in no danger whatsoever.
There is English in that lesson. That’s a fact. It does not meet that basic requirement to be considered a lesson in Lingq, so to me it should not be part of the library. Is everybody now allowed to create content in that fashion?
I agree with you Diego.
Besides, if I am not mistaken, in the explanation of the set of lessons it’s not mentioned that you need to know English in order to understand the lesson. Some people can find this surrealistic, but there is the possibility that someone wanted to learn Spanish without knowing a word or English (A little more of sarcasm).
Òscar, be careful with the sarcasm, being a foreigner, you know.
Rank, from the free lesson shown in the library, do you expect a beginner to be convinced of the efficacy of the lessons, and want to spend the money on them?
Rank I’m sorry if I offended you with my sarcasm. Of course it’s much more difficult to use sarcasm in a foreign language and I could be more precise if I will use it in Spanish, however, because we are writing in English in this thread, I tried in English. Some times sarcasm is the best and clearest answer.
However, I will try to explain.
I’m the main content provider in the Spanish library. I have 284 lessons on my own, and 619 lessons with IDEL and I’m getting around 4500 points per month. Do you know how many time have I invested in creating this 903 lessons? And I just get 4500 points a moth. I’m not pretending to be sarcastic right now. What I wanted to express before with the mortgage joke is that people, users of LingQ who create lessons for the library and spend a lot of time in that (there are a lot of good content providers here), we are not doing this for the points. Of course, the points are a nice reward for the effort, but definitely, it’s not my second job, we are not getting rich with this handful of points.
So when I’m being critical with these PDQ lessons it’s not because I will loose points from my lessons (something I know it won’t happen because of this PDQ lessons), it’s just because I think, as many people here, that these lessons don’t have the quality to be here. As someone else has already pointed out, if these lessons will be created by a free content provider, they will be deleted, as has happened before with bad quality lessons. And I agree with what some other people has said here, they use a lot of English (not allowed in any other LingQ lesson), they don’t warn you about this, etc.
I don’t know if my opinion (it was not a review) is valuable or not. I just know that I have been using LingQ for a long time, I’ve used hundreds of lessons in several lenguage, I’m a content provider and I’m a tutor for Spanish, so I know a little bit about LingQ’s philosophy and the kind of lessons you’ll find in the library and in this case, one lesson (of course I’m not going to waste my points to see the rest of them) is definitely more than enough to see how this lessons are and how they differ from the rest of the library.
I took a look at the PDQ lessons and wasn’t impressed, but in the end it’s up to learners what they use. While the audio does have English in it, the text apparently does not, so you can LingQ it the normal way. Even Pimsleur and Michel Thomas lessons could be adapted so that the text was just the target language content. Same with Teach Yourself and so on - the full TY text could be in a PDF.
Also, as time goes by, presumably more content will be added to the Store. Personally, I would very much like to be able to purchase CIDEB graded reading material in the store.
I think people will be able to understand (provided it is explained) that matierial in the LingQ Store is commercially produced material that does not always reflect LingQ’s recommended learning style.
How would you import those readers? Are they available digitally? I picked up a few while I was in France, but it would’ve been nice to have been able to read them through LingQ.
On the other hand, I suppose it’s also nice to do “extensive” style reading. I’ve gotten in the habit of working through LingQ, but it’s also nice to read something offline that is more or less at your level and just not worrying about LingQs.
I often scan books that I want to use on my computer. I do a lot of editing of courses, audio and other things so that I can work on the material the way I want to. I shift the annoyance of working with materials to the stage before I start on the language, instead of during it.
Something I’ve realised is that you’ve got to do some ‘solidifying’ of your reading process. I’ll find a series of books which I’m pretty comfortable with and just keep reading them until there are none left or I want to move to something else. I get used to the writer’s style, the words used and am happy with staying on that level for a little while. Learning the words is one thing - seeing them in many, many sentences is another level. I think this style of reading is how one picks up nuance best.
I’ve been following this conversation from the beginning, but couldn’t post a message because I was not at home and it would have been painful to write a long text on my iPod…
I agree with those who are perplexed with these Linguaphone courses. I have just had a look at the first Portuguese lesson and was quite disappointed with the quality of the text and with the lessons being mostly in English. I think that even some of the worst free lessons available at LingQ are somehow better than these Linguaphone ones.
I do share Albert’s worries (btw, I had caught the sarcasm…) about point distribution and Jolanda’s suggestion to remove the name of LingQ from the shelf label, so that it be called just “Store”.
It would be great if we could have Assimil courses on LingQ. Although only the Spanish, and partly the Portuguese, course did help me learn the language pretty well (but it may have been my fault if I didn’t manage to learn Czech, Finnish, Romanian, Neo-Greek and Serbo-Croatian with them), I think that they would work better with the LingQ method.
Having graded readers like CIDEB books would be great, too. Here is an Italian publisher of graded readers: http://www.elireaders.com/. They also publish graded magazines: http://www.elionline.com/elimagazines/2012/ita/. Steve, I think you should contact them. This way, LingQ could also reach school teachers and students.
So you scan them and then have some software to make the scan readable by the computer, ie it can recognize the words? I think that topic actually came up before, but I’m a bit foggy on it.