It would be a lovely help, but it would need to be quite a lot to make a real difference - if you happen to rob any banks in your spare time, do please let me know…
We’re hoping that we might get a bit of a helping hand from another organisation, but it’s not very clear to me at the moment what the timescale might be on that either, I’m afraid.
If it’s any consolation, the waiting is as frustrating for me as for anyone else - I really want to start learning languages again, but I’m thoroughly spoilt for other approaches too!
Is it so very much, and could it be crowd funded? (I’m sure you’ve considered that, but there must be lots of us on here who’d love to help out and be involved in the process but have no technical experience etc.)
The timing might be perfect. If I can resign myself to purgatory learning Hebrew by traditional methods, I will probably have built a foundation in Hebrew by the time you are ready to branch out, hopefully into Arabic among others. It looks like there is a reasonable demand out there to learn arabic and my goal is to be able to speak in both Hebrew and Arabic - so hopefully I will be able to learn arabic with you on SSi (late 2015?).
We’re thinking of doing a Kickstarter for the Celtic languages, which would involve getting the algorithm up and running as a first step - but we need to be a bit more confident that we can see light at the end of the development tunnel before we do that…
In terms of the cash - it’s not an easy on-off kind of thing - pop down to the shops and get an algorithm for £xx! - so it’s the challenge of uncertainty that means it would be a bit bonkers for us to stick a price on it. If we got a successful Kickstarter, then we’d be able to get some good freelancers to commit some time to it - but even then, it’s really important that we’ve got line of sight to a working model, rather than promising anything that turns out to be impossible/harder than expected to deliver…
Fingers crossed! It’s certainly not entirely impossible…
Does the kickstarter for Celtic languages include Irish?
And how about Breton in which I would be very interested as I spend quite a bit of time in France? I notice you do Cornish - am I right in that Breton and Cornish and Welsh are very closely linked following the movements of the Celts from Spain/France across the Channel.
Then I think I rememberreading that there was a bigger change in the language in the migration from Wales to Ireland and Scotland?
Pending an SSiB course, you may care to look at Assimil. I’ve seen 2 versions of their Breton course book, one using French as a base language, the other using German. (Not sure if there is an English based one). The audio is all in Breton, so applicable to any version. Not quite the same as SSi, but interesting, all the same. The relationship to Welsh was obvious from the written material; less so from the spoken material, but perhaps would become more obvious once you got more into it.
My understanding is that Cornish is nearer to Welsh than is Breton, although Cornish and Breton may be nearer to each other than either is to Welsh. (But that may be wrong of course! ).
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