Hi Yaser,
Thanks a lot for your help! Can you please send your translations and recordings to zoran(at)lingq.com ?
Everyone please be patient, I am receiving lot of emails with offer for help and I will contact you all. Thanks a lot!
I consider such Mini-stories as quite useful.
They are a bit artificial ( especially such kinds of questions), but it’s a necessary evil for the Beginner level.
However, they are too long for the level Beginner 1, they suits more for the level Beginneer 2.
Frankly speaking, from my own experience I know that it’s a very hard task to write something interesting and suitable for the level Beginner 1.
For example, numerous Spanish lessons for the Level Beginner 1, made by IDEL, are too short and that’s why they are not very helpful.
In my opinion the lessons for the level Beginner 1 must be not shorter than 30-40 seconds and not longer than 2 minutes.
By the way, the Mini-stories here are similar to Mini-stories, created by A.J.Hoge.
We have some of them here, but much more you can find in YouTube writring ‘AJ Hoge’ in the searching box.
I remember that his lessons several years ago improved significantly my English and encourage me to wtite my own lessons.
We do upload Mini-Stories under Beginner 2 level, not Beginner 1. 
Dear Steve, These mini-stories are really great. Will you write some also in intermediate level? Thank you.
Great Yaser! I’m looking forward to reading and listening to them in Arabic!
I discovered this approach to story telling when using Piotr’s stories at realpolish.pl. It turns out that many people ascribe these stories to AJ Hoge. I contacted AJ who gives the credit to Blaine Ra of TPRS fame. I will be talking on skype with AJ on April 11 and will post our discussion on youtube.
Check out this thread where I lay out my intentions with these stories. I would think that by level 3 at least, these will be intermediate. You will also get tired of them if you just stay with them, so they should be used in conjunction with other lessons you can find in our library and elsewhere, in my view.
This is great Thomas! Would you mind sending me audio records of mini stories to zoran(at)lingq.com ? I’d like to upload your recordings on LingQ too once when we have all stories translated and ready to go. Thanks!
Okay Zoran. I sent them to you.
Yes they definitely remind me of TPRS stories, the influence is very apparent. It’s just like how the teacher talks in a TPRS lesson, especially the question style.
Here is what Pavlos said about recording these.
“I use an android phone with the application “Smart Recorder”. I have it set to the best recording quality. I go to a quiet room and record the stories with my voice somewhat higher than my normal speaking and in about 20-30 cm distance from the mic. This app produces wav files. Afterwards I edit the files in my computer with Audacity( I use linux desktop) to remove noise(if any) and to convert it to mp3. That’s it!”
Jungleboy below offered this advice.
Some tips for recording quality. I record my ‘English in 10 Minutes’ podcast on an iPhone (using a small lapel microphone), so it’s certainly possible to have decent quality this way. I then use Audacity to do some minor editing work (mostly noise removal). If you search on YouTube, you can find some simple instruction videos to improve audio quality using Audacity. Good luck everyone!
I musts say that for my videos, I have found that the built in mics. on the iPhone were better than a lapel mic. So I guess it is a matter of trial and error.
I would recommend to Normalize. In Audacity it is in menu Effect | Normalize…
It makes the sound as louder as it’s possible without distortion.
It will make no visual or audible change if your input level was high enough.
It is the simplest way to improve the quality without any knoledge of the principals.
Hey everyone!
If someone is interested to help us translate mini stories into German and French, that would be great! We need more people for these 2 languages.
Also, if you can help us with audio recordings for German, French and Spanish, please contact me on zoran(at)lingq.com
I’ll visit Spain this summer and I hope to have Spanish mini stories up on LingQ as soon as possible, so that I can work on my Spanish!
If anyone can help with recordings, that would be awesome!
I am wondering if it will be possible to get some of these translated into Japanese? It may not be the easiest request to fill perhaps, not sure if there are Japanese speakers willing to try some. For the Greek recordings I assume somebody was hired to translate and record them?
Ask Yutaka!
We are short volunteers for Japanese Chinese and Korean. I will be recording some videos at my youtube channel today, in these languages, to try to recruit some volunteers.
Yes I, (not LingQ) paid for the Greek translations, because I am studying that language. We are hoping to get volunteers because 100 stories in over 20 languages is a lot of translating and recording. However, one way or another, I intend to have these stories in our major languages at LingQ.
My Chinese girlfriend has promised to translate some, already working on it.
If anyone is interested to help us translate/record Mini Stories into Czech, Polish or Ukrainian, please contact me on zoran(at)lingq.com We need more volunteers for these languages. Thanks!
Well thanks so much for having the Greek stories translated. They’re so helpful to me now I’m studying Greek a little.
Hopefully someone comes forward to help out with the Japanese, as I’d like to study Japanese more seriously later this year. I’ve asked my friend in Japan for anyone they know who could assist, but not having a lot of luck at the moment.
You’re right that a lot of stories in a lot of languages, is time consuming and would be very expensive to get translated.
As a native Czech speaker I can help with translation of the stories into my language.