I am a native Czech speaker, and I recently recommended LingQ to someone who would like to start learning Czech. Since I’ve never used the Czech section on LingQ myself, I decided to check the quality of the courses here.
Unfortunately, I found the quality of most audio recordings for beginners appalling. The audio in the course “CzechLingQ - Who Is She?” (the one people usually start with when they start learning a new language) contains so much noise that even Czech natives would have trouble understanding it at times, and as such it is completely unsuitable for language learners.
What is perhaps even worse is that the user “TheDoctor”, who created the course and most other courses for beginners, has a serious speech impediment (he is unable to pronounce R properly) and doesn’t have a very good command of his mother tongue.
For example, in the first short lesson of his course “Spontální monology o rutinních věcech”, there are more than 10 grammar/spelling errors and more than 10 mispronounced words. By the way, the word “spontální”, used in the title of the course (and many times throughout the course), is itself an error; the only correct spelling is “spontánní”.
The amount of effort taken to create the courses is certainly commendable, but I am sorry to say that the aforementioned Czech courses probably do more harm than good to non-native speakers.
Having gone through a lot of the Czech content here all I can say is that I agree with you:( Nevertheless, I do appreciate that somebody took his time to help others learn this beautiful, but not very popular at Lingq language.
Considering the number of errors (there are some in most of TheDoctor’s lessons and in all of his audio recordings), contacting the user with a list of improvements does not seem to be a viable option.
Making the corrections myself seems to be a more reasonable way of doing that, but I am not sure I feel comfortable with the idea of rewriting someone else’s lessons and replacing the audio with my own recordings. Is that an acceptable thing to do?
The course that has the most roses of all Czech courses on LingQ is his “spontaneous monologues”, as he called the course, where he talks about random stuff from his personal life. Surely, it would be inappropriate to edit those.
You can contact the Doctor, I think he can agree to rewrite these lessons together with you and then you can rerecord and upload them from two providers.
I make so with the most of my English and Geman lessons - I write the lessons, my English and German friends check them and help record them and after that I upload them from both of us.
So, I probably shouldn’t volunteer for this since it’s taking me so much longer to get ahead with the Bulgarian recordings than I expected, but I know a Czech couple in my home town, and I have reasonable quality recording gear; I could ask if they’d be up for speaking some of it if you like (assuming the text is up to quality)?