The LanguageGuide.org Blog

The English UK guide has been published. I'm visiting Morelia, Mexico again and had the good fortune of sharing a room at Hostal Allende with Jonny Gannon, who recently spent a year studying and teaching in Aguascalientes. When I first arrived at the hostel I heard Jonny speaking to a friend in Spanish and his accent was so good, I asked myself whether he was Mexican. It turns out he has a knack and in turn did an amazing French, Scottish, and then an American  accent. When doing the American accent, he pretended to be Steven, a Boston red-sox fan from Massachusetts, and to my American ears it was flawless. Perhaps to make me feel better about my inferior Spanish accent, he acknowledged that it is his forte and that he's less strong in audio comprehension. (My strength is audio comprehension due to my watching telenovelas  and series .)  Jonny studies Modern Languages at the University of South Hampton and speaks fluent French, Spanish, and German. After a demo he vol...

Some new categories have been added to the Mandarin Guide -  数字 (Numbers) ,   面部 (The Face) ,   身体 2 (The Body II) , and 农畜 (Farm Animals) . The voice you hear is that of Julie Zhu,  director of director of the Los Angeles Chinese Cultural Center . Julie is orginally from Beijing but has been a longtime resident of Los Angeles. In addition to teaching at the Los Angeles Chinese Cultural Center she teaches at local high schools. There are some other recordings I made with Julie that I hope to publish soon.

The board of directors of Language Guide has decided to run ads on portions of the English and French guides to try to fill a budget hole. If you're using these pages in a school environment, send me an email and I'll send you a link that disables the ads. We weren't able to reach our fundraising goal earlier this year which has required the ads. After the budget hole is filled, there are some ideals we're going to try to encourage donations, and we're gong to pursue other funding sources. Our goal is to fund the project through the npr / pbs model - a combination of donations and perhaps underwriters.

If you're using a browser that supports SVG  ( IE 9 ,  chrome , firefox, safari), you'll notice new features on the body page ( English body , French body , Russian body , Mandarin body , Japanese body ) and face page ( English face , French face , Russian face , German face , Italian face ). When you place your cursor over a red circle, the portion of the body that is being referred to is outlined. (The effect is most visually appealing in google chrome due to it's great support for SVG filters.)  You can choose the level of difficulty that you prefer using a drop down menu that's next to the options menu. On the body page if you choose an intermediate difficulty, the red circles that refer to the names of individual fingers, the hamstring and shoulder blade disappear. If you choose the beginning difficulty level, you can focus on words like arm, leg, hand, and head. When doing a quiz, you'll only be quizzed on the words tha...

A portion of the new Spanish of Mexico vocabulary guide is now available. This past winter I travelled to Morelia, Mexico and did most of the recordings there. (Thankfully the  narco siege  was over.) Paula One of the voices you hear is that of Paula, a teacher at the Baden Powel Institute , a Spanish school in Morelia. You can hear her voice h e r e . You can also hear my good friend Romelia Núñez Juárez h e r e. Romy is a doctor that works for la cruz roja. Katia Finally there is Kathia Jemal who is originally from Morelia but currently works in an art gallery in San Antonio. You can hear her voice h e r e .

Recently a new  Italian vocabulary guide was published. One of the v o i c e s y o u h e ar is that of Giovanni, my hostel roommate in Morelia, Mexico. During our discussion of what we do, I gave him a demo of the project and he volunteered! Giovanni is a winemaker and world traveler. When it's harvest time in the southern hemisphere, you'll find him in Chile, Argentina, or Australia. When it's harvest time in the north, you'll find him in a vineyard in California or Europe.