Hi Hector - thank you very much for that - yes, the whole overall arc of open-source is something we’ve thought a lot about. You’re certainly right that we’re not on the radar of any of the big players at the moment - and yet if we published the entire map of exactly what we’re trying to do with the SSiBorg (which I think is what we’d need to do for successful open-sourcing), it would be a matter of weeks for a large company to provide a copy of what we do, if we ever did get any momentum.
I’m a huge fan of open-source, and I’d love to see a world in which people shared all their ideas freely and openly - and I know that there are people who’ve managed to do that, and still fund their projects and lives successfully - but for us, it just still seems an enormously risky and complicated step at this stage.
We will keep on thinking about it, though, because it certainly has lots of attractive elements.
My slightly haphazard on/off ability to remember about the news section is a large part of why I’m thinking a monthly overview might run a bit more smoothly… But thank you, yes, I’ll try to keep it from swallowing too much time - definitely appreciate the feedback there…
@tatjana, my phone uses Android. However, now you mention it, I can’t seem to find the News section on it. I thought it was one of the menu options. Perhaps it’s on the main PC website?
As I recall it is on this forum, special category here, but, as @aran says, there was not published anything for quite amount of time - well not so big amount of time anyway - 28th October was the last news announcing that "News: L2 southern 25 published… ".
However I understand why Aran posted this particular thread in here (in General/Questions). News category is closed for comments what is the only thing right if staff wants to maintain it as News (only) category.
So, you might have this particular category in mind when talking about News features.
Levels 1 and 2 are excellent, can’t wait level 3. I think the state oflay report is a great idea. Thank you all at SSi foryour dedication and hard work.
Good to see a significant expansion of languages, relative to the current base, in a fairly short timescale I would be particularly interested to know how soon(-ish) the SSiBorg will facilitate the availability of “Language X through the medium of Language Y” where Language Y is NOT English.
Whilst there is a whole matrix of “Language X through Language Y” possibilities, I must confess a special interest in the prospect of [Range of New Languages] trwy gyfrwng y Gymraeg. To get right down to the point, I am keen to (re-)learn the French and Spanish which I learned inadequately at school using traditional classroom methods. But if these courses can be expected using Welsh as the language of instruction within any sort of reasonable timescale, I am tempted to hold off doing the English medium versions of the courses so that I can test the effect of using my relatively recently learned Welsh as a learning medium. Hopefully, in the process, I may be able both to learn effectively through Welsh and to establish Welsh even more firmly than at present in my mind.
I think the prospect of being able to learn a “third” language through the medium of a “second” language is very exciting. Apart from anything else, it gets one away (hopefully, or it may help to get one away) from “thinking in English”, or mentally translating to English all the time.
We’ve probably got a bit more work to do on the SSiBorg for it to handle this smoothly, but we’ll be starting to try and hammer it out pretty much as soon as we have our next round of new languages up and running…
This is very exciting! Glad to hear that the Welsh Level 3 is on the way. I’m also wondering if the Latin course will advance at any point? I’ve done all of what’s offered in that course and would love to do more. Excited to hear about the other upcoming additions, and am hoping Swedish also will make its way onto the list at some point.
Slovenian may get more popular now that the wife and son of the next President are fluent/native speakers!
Speaking personally I would prefer SSIW, to make a priority of going further with saying something in WELSH, and then, and thereafter, looking to apply the brilliant learning principles to other languages people are desperate to learn quickly and fluently, like German or Russian, or Chinese, rather than languages like Cornish, Manx etc . Just a personal opinion though:slight_smile:
Yes, but the ground of SSi I always understood as to protect and preserve not just Welsh but all minority languages especially those which are “vanishing” already, just like Manx, Cornish etc …Of course the method is brilliant, too brilliant not to implement some of “main” languages into it aswell.
That the wife and the son of future president of USA are fluent Slovene speakers (I actually don’t know about son tnough) - it will be forgotten as quickly as it was remembered so the Slovene language in that matter has no bigger chance of bigger interest then some other languages - Croatian, Serbian, or what’s more to them I believe.
Also I have always wonderred how colloquial SSiSlovene should go if implementing it in SSiLanguages. There are bigg (really big) differences inbetween daily spoken language and more formal but still colloquial language in Slovene and written/formally spoken language is something quite different aswell. So, we can have 3 aspects of Slovene - very colloquial, colloquial and formal (spoken) language and slang is (still) excluded from that.
For example: If I ask “What do you want?” I can ask this at least two ways:
“Kva b’ rada?” (very colloquial and mostly every day expression) or “kva češ?”
or more formal “Kaj bi rada?” or “Kaj hočeš?”
Of course depends of the tone in the voice both expressions can be very impolite if voice not right tuned.
the most formal (as it’s written and is polite also) would be “Kaj želiš?”. - Here’s no dilema. Even if the voice is not tuned too rightly you almost can’t go impolite with such question but we don’t use it mostly in daily conversations.
So it really is the question how colloquial we should go with Slovene.
Sorry for going a bit offtopic but I just want to point out teaching/learning colloquial way is sometimes a bit of dilema and hard. And, to be honest: I’ve listened to “Colloquial Slovene” course and have established it’s not too much of colloquial at all but quite very formal, even “academic” at times. We mostly don’t speak like this in everyday life but of course Slovene was always taught this way in courses.
Personally, I would like to see more of a focus on less popular (than the likes of Spanish, German and Mandarin, at least) languages for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because those languages already have a ton of semi-decent resources, and secondly because not having to compete on the open marketplace with significantly bigger names (such as Michel Thomas and Pimsleur) could paradoxically make the smaller languages into bigger sources of income, which might in turn allow them to stop relying on volunteers for various aspects of the business, and to actually get some advertising going so that more people actually know that this course exists.
Also if you put all the speakers of these smaller languages together then that is a really big number of people - if only we could all work together - lots of little languages, but they could have a strong combined voice and there could be some beautiful harmonies.
I think regular updates is a great idea. But, I think monthly is too often. So far, not much changes in a month’s time and it will be more taxing on your time (a month goes by pretty quickly ). So maybe consider quarterly updates.
It’s something we’ve talked about in great detail - not least because our personal inclination is strongly towards smaller languages.
So far, though, our best possibilities for scaling all seem to come from directions that require at least some evidence that our work is relevant to larger languages. I’m hoping that we’ll have enough momentum to start investing more in smaller languages in the course of next year…
@craigf - thanks for that, Craig, appreciated! My only concern is that I’m less likely to remember quarterly updates… But I’m fairly sure you’re right that the monthly updates will, in general, tend to be a bit shorter than this one…
Because I know how highly commited one must be to fulfill “the promise” then and if there’s not particularly new and many things to tell, the updates can be more or less very much the same with no mommentum in them.
But thank you, yes, I’ll try to keep it from swallowing too much time - definitely appreciate the feedback there… 
I would be particularly interested to know how soon(-ish) the SSiBorg will facilitate the availability of “Language X through the medium of Language Y” where Language Y is NOT English.