Should languages be free to learn?
Introduction: Where I stand on this.
As someone who speaks about one and a third languages (Good English and barely passable Japanese.), it has often struck me as strange that learning languages is something that is often expensive to learn, and it is difficult to find a learning program worth it’s paper or bandwidth.
After having gone to Japan, I came across Tae Kim’s guide to Japanese, a well written guide that I’d wish I’d had before going, which is the work of a single individual and freely distributed freely to anyone who wants it.
This lead me to wonder why there exists an entire industry devoted to what a small office of linguists could kick out in a few months, post on the internet and then sell paper copies off for people’s convenience.
Further-more, while there may be those who lobby against it, this would be something well worth the government’s time, to create a definitive guide to speaking their country’s language and translating that guide into as many other languages as possible as a way of making it easy for others to integrate into a society.
The situation at hand.
Let me start by saying that this isn’t a case of “What if?” but something that began more than five years ago1 but may yet need to pick up some serious speed. With things like Tae Kim’s excellent guide and Wikibooks, the idea that something known by the population of an entire country should be kept as something for those who pay for it is going to go out of style faster than the idea of paying in the range of £20 for an album with five good tracks on it if you’re lucky.
The collapse of Nova (Japan’s biggest English school franchise.) in 2007 really brought home how much people pay to learn something that should have a single, concise, and documented guide (Varied for region, i.e. British and American for English.). A single website that will teach you, through words, sound and video, how to go from knowing literally nothing about how to speak or write a language to having enough competency to then learn from others (A leaving-the-nest scenario.).
The need to communicate with other humans while learning is a problem that would need to be solved in conjunction with this, but combining Skype with a system similar to Rhino Spike (A service where you speak phrases in your language in return for phrases spoken in another.) may be the beginnings of another way to facilitate such things.
The wider implications.
Given what the internet can now deliver in terms of multimedia, we are at the point where, once a system has been established for teaching people how to do things, in the same way that wikis have been recognised at the standard repository for written knowledge and documentation, the wiki learning system (For want of a better piece of jargon.) should hopefully replicate naturally.
In a sense, it is not the knowledge or people what need to be created, merely the standard for freely communicated knowledge. Wikipedia appeared and now there are wikis for everything ranging from traveling the world (WikiTravel.) to the long and varied fiction of Star Wars (Wookiepedia.), once someone properly creates a structure for learning topics to the point it starts replicating, it’s time to think about selling up in the Teach Yourself sector.
In conclusion.
The recent years have seen the event of creating a single repository of knowledge when it comes to encyclopedia style collections of facts. Going forward, organising these facts into an easier to learn format than can be easily replicated for various sorts of skills.
In short: We’ve got reference books down as far as wikis go, but complete how-to courses are going to need someone to arrive at a recognized standard. The sooner the better.
1Assuming Tae Kim’s guide was around for a few years before I heard of it.
Image is made up of the Wikipedia logo and this mock up by Ryanhagemandesign.
While there are already portable power solutions like the Freeloader and Powermonkey products, you don’t get a whole lot for what you pay.
Today, the fourth AA battery charger I own came (I also have two Camera battery chargers.); An Energizer Quattro, who’s four channels meant that I could finally charge batteries in odd number (Or any mix I felt like.) without risking leakage.
