It’s a real shame that people totally ignore older books. But, unfortunately people only want what they can get from tomorrow. haha
Il_melomane70: 29za?
@imi…: I mean with ‘contemporary content’ books that are written in our days, modern books. Probably it is not the correct expression due to my lack of English. Sometimes I’ve no idea how I have to express an idea in English 
German Wikipedia articles are seldom written in a way that you can enjoy them. They are usually in a very technical language with lots of numbers. I guess it is how the German Wikipedia authors think it should be written. Some time ago I tried to find articles that I could use on LingQ but I decided not to take them because of the way they are written. I’ve taken some of them for lessons but I made a lot of improvements and changes which were very time consuming.
@All:
I’m with il_melomane70 here. I cannot judge for other languages but in German there is definitely a difference between the language in classicals and the today’s spoken language. Maybe it is different in English, and that’s the reason why people often disagree when I say that I prefer contemporarily literature?
Probably people think they look more educated when they claim to read classical. This is maybe true especially if you study linguistics at university, but I want to learn a language how it is spoken and not for university. I guess a lot of learners think like I do.
A personal disadvantage for me is that I really like novels that represent today’s live. I can more ‘feel’ with the people in the book. But that is my personal experience. I rarely read old books in my own language for that reason. And yes, I admit, that I’ve read most of the really old books because I was forced by my teachers to do this. I found some interesting under historical aspects to learn about moral and live in the past. But I would lie if I say I’ve enjoyed them. Never the less I read some ‘old’ books deliberately but most of them form the 19th century and not older ones. I’ve enjoyed books form Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Karl May and others which you can get for free.
But there are some general disadvantages too. German classicals have a lot of disadvantage (as I said I cannot speak for other languages):
- Died out words
- Lack of words that are used today
- Changed meaning of words
- Grammar that no longer is used
- Unnatural usage of the language (somewhat artificial because it is ‘literature’)
- Really old-fashioned phrases that are no longer used (out of date)
- Incorrect spelling (spelling has changed several times in the past)
Sending more emails out about audio books would be good. Better, would be putting this information on a webpage and sending out the link, as well as perhaps some of the text. I wanted to post the audio book email to my facebook page, but this would have been more effective were the info on a webpage.
I agree that there’s nothing wrong with wanting to read contemporary material, Veral. I never claimed that there was anything about it. As I said, I only read contemporary material in Dutch. It’s just that I just disagree with some of the reasons why other people think it is useless. I was never saying that you must read classics…it’s about being open minded, which many people aren’t.
@ Veral: “contemporary content” is a perfectly good English expression that means exactly what you thought it meant. You can also say, as Imyirtseshem says, “contemporary material,” as well as “contemporary materials” to mean the same thing.
Audiobooks: Audiobooks are a joy, but scanning the text for an audiobook is a real tedious time-burner, so I’ve stopped importing them into private lessons. Instead, I listen to them outside of LingQ and add the time to the “Hours of Listening” slot of my Progress Snapshot. Obviously it is a much easier task to use audiobooks that LingQ already contains or audiobooks that can be imported as private lessons from Librivox or some other source that has both the audio and the text of the book.
I agree that scanning books is a pain and in the end not practical. I need e-books that can be imported into LingQ and that normally means the classics. I should add Goethe, Jaroslav Hašek , Karel Čapek, Turgenev, Balzac, de Maupassant, (try his “Horla” which we obtained permission to use (from Livraphone) here in our French Library at LingQ) amongst others, to the various “out of date” writers I have listened to and studied at LingQ.
I do not share this aversion to old material. The occasional out of date word or turn of phrase will not influence my learning, since I am also reading and listening to a lot of contemporary material. On the other the sense of another time greatly enhances the enjoyment I feel in discovering another language and culture.
I scan a great deal of books, so I’m quite used to it. But, it is quite time consuming. Still, as any good language learner would guess, I listen to languages in that time. It’s worth it, in the end, because I get the material I want into LingQ. I can’t wait to give some French classics a go when I’m up to that stage. Should be great fun.
Steve, I think that knowing some of these older words and phrases only deepens one’s appreciate of the language. That’s my experience, at least.
I tend to agree with you about the older works deepening our appreciation of the language, as well as the culture.
@KnowItSome - We will continue sending out emails advertising our audiobooks. You can link to a web version of the newsletter available here Learning Languages with Audiobooks.
@KnowItSome - We will continue sending out emails advertising our audiobooks. You can link to a web version of the newsletter available here Learning Languages with Audiobooks.
@Mark: I cannot imagine that these audiobooks attract lots of new learners and appeal to most of the new ones. People can find them for free on Librivox. It is nothing special that LingQ have those in the library. If you want to make advertisement you have to think about what makes LingQ outstanding - lessons that are not or difficult to find on the Internet elsewhere. (I assume that you send these emails as a kind of advertisement).
We are always looking for items to put in our Newsletter. While audio books are not that popular it is useful to make people aware of them.
I would like to see suggestions of other information to put in the Newsletter.
How about guest posts from members such as
“My favourite lesson”
“My favourite LingQ function”
The only problem is that we would inevitably have to choose some submissions and not others and this could cause unhappiness.
Speaking of favourite functions, I wonder if there are people who do not use the “bookmarklet” function? I use it all the time, even if I can easily read some content. I used the bookmarklet to import Vera’s Forum Post about friends because there were a few words there that I wanted to learn.
I didn’t use the bookmarklet until I saw your recent videos using it. I’d seen it at the top of the pages on the site before but didn’t know what it actually did, and of course didn’t take the time to find out. But after seeing those videos and seeing it in action I use it all the time. When I think of all those Japanese blog posts I’d been reading without it for over a year… shame on me.