07 April, 2008

Free language education on Podcast.

I have been studying German from podcasting. I bought an iPod to watch the broadcasting of the German chancellor. Swiss information site has podcasting of the day, but it would be cool to have more politicians working on expressing oneself in decent medias. I found some US politicians broadcasting their speeches and congress meetings on YouTube. I am not sure who is really handling the posting as we can assume that the politicians are too busy to upload files by themselves or learn how to trim the films. These days, so many politicians are thinking about their own circles than the folks voting them. They should keep some way to contact with the citizens like what German chancellor does. And it is good for Hochdeutsch learning, too!!! Ah, I am not talking about some “Republicans” who speak German as their native language, but it makes them to look intelligent if they make some broadcasting in several languages. They might not use their language ability so that they can make a bar between their domestic media and foreign media for censorship.

I have been listening to Stefan's http://german-podcast.blogspot.com. Then I figured out that it is a good challenge to make a few language course by my own. Well, too bad that my Egyptian hieroglyph dictionary is in my Japanese home, so I cannot make free Egyptian hieroglyph lessons on podcast. Without the dictionary, I cannot remember the pronunciations of the hieroglyphs.

Coptic is relatively new and gets some attention after that Dan Brown's DaVinci Code, but there is none speak Copt anymore and it is a bad choice for the language speech lesson. There would be Coptic churches in Egypt chanting in Copt but it is something off from language training.
Therefore, I might consider making something like 10 to 20 lesson sessions for Japanese. When I taught my friend taking Japanese in Foothill College, her score raised from C to A in few weeks! Anyway, if you are interested learning a bit of Japanese, you might be interested listening to the sessions. After I moved to another place, I would make full session as an introduction course. Anyway, it is free and good for me to keep my CV look better. Volunteer works count pretty much sometimes, right?

I might be able to make Latin version, but I am still in the beginner level. So, it is good to teach something I am fluent in.

From my experience, there are few tips that the language study increase better from the ear.
For the beginner level, tapes must have more vocabularies than complete sentences. And a word to word level translation and explanation work pretty good to memorize the meaning of the foreign word.

Some basic sentences for every day situation would be useful and worse memorizing them. Such sentences are usually in the tourist guide books.

Listening to the conversation would be good, but it is a bit hard to keep concentrating on someone else's conversation unless it is a type of listening test... like the one on TOEFL.
Poetry and small story would work good if the vocabulary translation and sentence to sentence level translation included in the lesson.

Let's see how my free lessons will be. Since I know what Introduction to Japanese looks like from teaching it to my friend. My aim is to make one set that can beat the semester level language course.

I am hoping that it would prove my Japanese knowledge and being a skilled teacher, which is a heritage from my family. My family members are mostly in education field – my grand grandpa was a principal of a secondary school, my grandpa was working at university speaking three or four languages including English and Russian, my uncle is a professor at Osaka University, another uncle is a high school teacher, my both parents were also teachers. I heard about the e-tutoring opportunity and translation job opportunities. It is worth to try something that would help others.

Oh, yeah, I have another project going on – a Latin proverb book. But it is good to keep something on my hand to make me busy. And studying Geman will balance up my time fully engaged in researches and study.

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