One thing I thought of while musing about SSiKlingon – how are SSiSomething courses developed / drawn up / designed?
I imagine it’s not possible to simply copy SSiWelsh, introducing the same words and the same grammar in the same order, since different languages will have different things that are important for learners to know and different things will be easy or difficult.
Plus you can’t put words together in the same way in every language so knowing A and B might let you easily say “A B” in one language but might require something else in another (compare “I know” + “He is young” = “I know he is young” but Dw i’n gwybod. + Mae o’n ifanc = Dw i’n gwybod fod o’n ifanc which would have to be explicitly taught).
How was SSiSpanish or SSiCornish designed, for example? Who decided in what order to teach things?
If SSiKlingon were to become a reality, would the voice(s) or teacher(s) come up with a course plan? Aran and Iestyn with some input from the voices? Everyone together? How would that work?
I hope SSiKlingon will someday be a possibility! Though I’m not sure who the Klingon side of the volunteers (voices, course designers, etc.) would be.
If you search for ‘SSiBorg’ you’ll find scattered bits of information about the course creation tool - which is the future-answer to this question…
Up until now, most of what we do has been built by hand by me - but Ifan has spent the last three years or so working on an algorithm-driven interface to build courses (because building by hand is extremely slow and labour-intensive, and pretty much requires needing to learn enough of each new language to fix the ways in which it breaks the methodology).
When the SSiBorg is field-tested and battle-hardened, what we’ll need for each new language will be:
A translator
A sentence builder (or more than one)
A male voice
A female voice
And that will be all… each of them will be able to log in to a control panel for their work, and when their work is done, the next person will be able to do their bit…
Where we can manage to pay people for their time, there’s no fundamental reason why we shouldn’t be able to build a full new course - 75 lessons or more - in a week or so…
I’m really enjoying the whole process of SSiS (learning a new language again + learning efficiently and fast, without all the dusty useless faff), especially since I studied English linguistics, taught French, and trained to become an English teacher - so it’s really awesome from a pedagogical and linguistic point of view for me.
Since I started a couple of months ago, I’ve often thought that I’d be really happy to be involved with building a French equivalent of this learning platform (I’m French _).
So… I guess that here is a good way to offer my help? Or if it isn’t, please direct me to the right person/page.
That’s a really kind offer - thank you so much! We’ve got quite a stockpile of people who’ve been kind enough to offer to help - but once we get to actual beta-testing, it would make a lot of sense for us to reach out to a few different people - more the merrier, kind of thing
Does that mean that the sentence-builder(s) just come up with a list of sentences (and perhaps sentence parts) that would be useful to know, and SSiBord takes care of determining in which order to introduce them by looking at what is common to them? Sounds like magic
Will SSiBorg-built courses also have natural-language explanations in between the sentence drills, of the kind “Now the way to say ‘X’ in LANGUAGE is ‘Y’. Sometimes you’ll also hear ‘Z’ but we’ll go with ‘Y’ as that’s more common in daily speech. Don’t worry about it whether you hear ‘Y’ or ‘Z’, but just use ‘Y’ for now.” ?
I hope SSi keeps growing, and whatever makes it easier for it to do so, the better
Not quite… we start with a set of seed sentences, and the building is based on them… and then yes, the SSiBorg sorts out the ordering…
We’re working on refining the introductions - it gets a bit tricky (‘sometimes you’ll also hear’ is VERY hard to automate) but I think that using model sentences ('x is y, for example ‘sentence with x’).
@baruch - thank you for that very kind offer - I’ll definitely be in touch when we’re ready…
They say it about Cornish too, which has something to do with how the Cornish language almost completely died out…
Sorry to butt in — it’s just been very interesting to learn a bit more about how the courses are put together and how the SSiBorg is intended to work. I’d be glad to offer to help with future Cornish lessons (the only language I’m learning at the moment) if there’s anything I could do. Other than that, I’m just excited at the thought of many more SSi courses available in other languages and hoping it all keeps progressing!
