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DLI courses

PostPosted: August 25th, 2009, 9:09 am
by newyorkeric
Glad to see the new forum!

Any chance that you guys will upload the DLI courses that Fat-tony has?

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: August 26th, 2009, 5:41 am
by VagabondPilgrim
There has been no firm decision on how to handle DLI courses. While many of the courses are definitely public domain (some have already been uploaded here), some fall more into a gray area. I had been tossing around the idea of starting up a separate DLI site, but found that someone else ("poetry" from the old forum) had already started the process.

When Fat Tony posted about his material, he was directed to contact Poetry, but I haven't heard what has come of it. It could well be that some of his material ends up here, but I just haven't had the time to follow up on any of this.

That's where it stands at the moment.

-VP

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: August 27th, 2009, 2:09 am
by Talairan
Would you know if the DLI site is up and running?

Tal.

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: August 27th, 2009, 3:27 pm
by VagabondPilgrim
Nope, there's just a placeholder:

http://www.dli-language-courses.com/

I'll try emailing poetry and see if I get a response.

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: September 3rd, 2009, 12:39 pm
by daristani
While we wait for Poetry's site to get up and running (and wish her Godspeed in this effort), note that Fat-tony has been posting some of the DLI courses online at file-sharing services. The materials he's been able to upload so far, with the addresses to download them, can be found at this URL:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=16633&PN=1

Various others have been helping him by posting mirrors.

Also, the DLI Modern Standard Arabic course can be downloaded as a torrent at:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1590789

and the DLI French course at:

http://www.mininova.org/tor/1593799

Having looked at a couple of the courses uploaded by Fat-tony, I'm struck by the fact that the DLI courses, just like the FSI courses, in fact differ a fair amount from one another. The DLI Hungarian course, for instance, seems to be a very complete and detailed course, with a great deal of grammatical explanation. It differs from the FSI course in having more and shorter lessons, so that the learner doesn't have to cover nearly so much material in a given lesson, making it, in my mind, more "user friendly" than FSI's Hungarian course. The Persian course, in contrast, seems to have essentially no grammatical explanation, so that unless you're already pretty familiar with the grammar, you'll likely find it disappointing, except perhaps for reading practice. (Also, the audio that Fat-tony has posted for volume one seems to belong to another, more advanced course in military Persian, rather than volume one of the basic course.

The various Arabic dialect courses seem quite extensive, but appear to assume a knowledge of standard Arabic, as most phenomena in the dialects are explained by comparing to and contrasting with standard Arabic, which I think all DLI Arabic students normally study first.

In short, the DLI materials vary, but strike me as very well-done, except for the Persian one, and well worth taking a close look at.

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: September 16th, 2009, 8:13 am
by sprengel
It doesn't seem that there is anything happening at the DLI site ?

I have several of the DLI courses from the addresses mentioned. Still no interest to put them on your site ?
Where do you get the information about the Copyright of a course ?

Something else - can anybody teach me how to improve the quality of an audio file - I would like to go through some of the courses (and off course giving them back to the community after clean-up). I am using Linux and Audacity.

Thank you.

Re: DLI courses

PostPosted: September 19th, 2009, 8:45 pm
by VagabondPilgrim
All text material (pre March 1989) and audio (Feb 1972 - March 1989) is in the public domain if there is no copyright notice (pre March 1989) and/or they were created by government employees as part of their normal duties. All pre-1972 audio and any post March 1989 is in the public domain if they were created by government employees as part of their normal duties. Whether or not the material was offered to the general public also comes into play.

To be honest, I just haven't had the time to look through much of the material. My day job has kept me extremely busy and what time I've had lately has been taken up with the nuts and bolts of keeping the site running.

The one course that I've looked at is Mandarin and it's a mixed bag. The earlier volumes seem little more than updated FSI material, but the later volumes begin with a notice that they are based on copyrighted material and that they were not for sale to the general public.

Also, it's been the policy of this site to only post material digitized directly from official government media. I'm not sure where Fat-Tony is getting his material from, but I get the impression that he is downloading it from somewhere else. This, too, can be problematic.

As to the audio, I'm a bit of a novice. Demi-Puppet posted a good summary of how he went about the process of digitizing audio shortly before the old forum was shut down. I'll see if I can dig it up and post it here.

Re: Digitizing Audio

PostPosted: October 19th, 2009, 5:31 am
by mantis713
I have a machine that will digitize cassette tapes. The machines produces cleaner audio that any software I've worked with. I do also have software that will clean up noise. I would be happy to digitize any materials that anyone has for no cost. I only ask that you include a copy of the written materials. I also do not care about the source of the materials. I believe you have the right to preserve your materials. Whether or not they are posted is up to the forum guidelines. If you have materials you may contact me directly at gmail. My userid is the same as the one for this forum.
regards