Nate Hill has a new site that could be of interest to our group. Here he describes it:
As language teachers — especially as TPRS teachers — you know the importance of personalized CI for language learners. Wouldn’t it be great if language learners could build a network of speakers in the target language who could help create CI when they needed?
Well, I’ve just launched Fluentli, a community site that will help anyone do just that. Of course, teachers could do this for use in their classes as well.
The concept is simple. If you have a particular question (“How do you use German’s ‘eben’ in a conversation?” “What are common small talk questions you might use at a Japanese dinner party?”), you can get a variety of answers back. Here’s where it gets interesting. Fluentli even has audio answers in addition to normal text answers.
If you know a language well enough, you can tell when machine translations are really strange. But real people do a much better job because they can interpret situations, and teach you colloquial expressions — not to mention we’re learning languages for the human experience!
One you’ve got some text answers, the audio record button is right inline with the comments. There is no limit to the number of speakers who can record the same answer. So not only are you able to get one speaker, but potentially several. This helps in understanding different accents, speech styles, common responses, etc. that you normally don’t get when listening to the same person all the time.
The result is lots and lots of personalized CI.
What other creative ways do you think you could use Fluentli?
Please take a look around when you have a second, and do me a favor by sending any questions or feedback my way. Together, I think we can build a truly remarkable community that will help encourage people to learn the languages we love.
Nate
http://fluentli.com/