Talk:Spanish by Choice/SpanishPod lessons

Welcome!
If you want to add a page for a podcast please go ahead or let me know if you need any help. In fact, if necessary I'll do the converting and uploading of the audio file and the Wiki-formatting of your text page. If you want to start right away (without bothering about audio files and Wiki-formatting), just fill in one of the yet incomplete transcripts (marked by the little red icon next to the lesson ID). --Martin Kraus (talk) 08:35, 19 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Right now, there are no such incomplete transcripts because I think 40 lessons make a nice set. However, there are still about a dozen SpanishPod newbie lessons at spanishpod.com that could be included in this wikibook. If you want to give it a try, you are more than welcome! You can have as much or little help as you want, just tell me. --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:25, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Note that the print version of this part of the wikibook has its own discussion page. --Martin Kraus (talk) 15:18, 3 December 2008 (UTC)

About the Structure of the Lesson Pages
Basically, the structure is:
 * some introduction with more or less important information (the information about related lessons is still missing and will be added when there are more lessons included)
 * the link to the audio lesson and the dialogue
 * the transcript of the dialogue (for a first reading without hints about the translation)
 * the transcript of the dialogue with word-by-word translations and translations of sentences
 * vocabulary from the dialogue, including dictionary forms (infinitive for verbs and masculine and feminine forms for adjectives)
 * vocabulary not included in the dialogue but mentioned in the audio lesson, including phrases and dictionary forms
 * additional vocabulary, in particular conjugated forms of verbs for all persons and pronouns for all persons
 * exercises:
 * all kinds of exercises could be included but I would suggest to first create a basic set, including quite challenging exercises, i.e., translating sentences from English to Spanish. Of course, all exercises should be ordered with increasing difficulty. I think that interactive ("clickable") exercises are more fun than "static" exercises; however, interactive exercises have to provide a static version for printing. For the basic set of exercises I suggest to have one Spanish to English translation and three English to Spanish translation exercises:
 * “Dialogue Translation”: just the lesson text from Spanish to English.
 * “Dialogue Recall”: the lesson text from English to Spanish.
 * “Dialogue Remix”: a (preferable funny) variation of the lesson text with the vocabulary mentioned in the audio lesson
 * “Dialogue Recast”: a variation of the lesson text where the number and gender of persons are changed or the verb is changed from formal to informal or vice versa; this will usually require vocabulary from the section with additional vocabulary

There are a couple of templates (with prefix Sbc) that should be used for the lesson pages in order to allow for quick and consistent design and layout changes. Please consult the source code of one of the existing lesson pages. The print version should consist of a single template in order to simplify changes. In order to present the exercises in different ways for printing and for display on screen, two templates are used (one within ... the other within ... ). It would be preferable to hide this alternative within a single template, but the wiki syntax does not seem to support this well. (One could use class="noprint" and class="printonly" but these affect only the final printout, not the displayed print version, thus it is somewhat less suitable.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 10:11, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Grammar Topics
I realized that the "grammar topics" in the table of contents sometimes differ from the actual grammar topic discussed by JP and Liliana in the lesson. This should be fixed for more consistency, i.e., the "grammar topic" should always summarize some grammar discussed by JP and Liliana. (Not necessarily but often the grammar topic discussed right after the final repetition of the dialogue.) --Martin Kraus (talk) 12:29, 12 November 2008 (UTC)

Done.--Martin Kraus (talk) 20:30, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

About Using a Commercially Produced Podcast in a Wikibook
The idea of using SpanishPod lessons in a wikibook was born when SpanishPod stopped licensing new audio lessons under a Creative Commons License on September 1, 2008. At that time I realized that the prior audio lessons are under a suitable license to upload them to WikiMedia Commons. Moreover, I also realized that the audio files alone are not sufficient to learn Spanish on an introductory level (at least not for me); thus, my idea was to make the audio lessons publicly available together with dialogue transcripts. I'm convinced that the use of commercially produced audio lessons offers several crucial advantages:
 * for readers of WikiBooks: the combination of professional audio materials with extended dialogue transcripts, images from WikiMedia Commons for some words, interactive exercises, and related links to Wikipedia can result in a high-quality wikibook for an introductory language course.
 * for authors of WikiBooks: the use of professional audio materials dramatically reduces the work required to create useful learning materials, in particular for non-native speakers. Moreover, these materials can be used for wikibooks in any language for learning the target language.
 * for the company that provides the audio materials: the use of commercially produced audio materials in a wikibook is likely to motivate some readers to sign up with the commercial podcast for additional materials, further courses, etc. Without this advantage for the company, there would be far less motivation for companies to provide materials under a suitable license.
 * for users of the commercial podcast: a wikibook based on introductory materials can engage advanced users of the commercial podcast to apply their knowledge by contributing exercises, transcripts, links, etc., i.e. it offers additional language learning activities. This way, the WikiBooks project might also win new authors.

Given the multitude of benefits, the concept of using commercially produced audio materials in wikibooks is very likely to offer great opportunities, at least for wikibooks on language learning. In order to make sure that this model succeeds, I would like to establish some basic guidelines for the Spanish by Choice wikibook:
 * inclusion of the commercially produced material only with the explicit consent of the company that provides this material
 * Even if many ways of including materials are covered by the creative commons license, a company is likely not to approve all of them. In these cases, authors of wikibooks should almost always conform with the wishes and suggestions of the company. In the long run, it is far more important to establish a working and cooperative relation with companies that provide materials than to exploit the already available materials to the fullest extend.


 * highest quality standards
 * It is a lot easier to create useful wikibooks based on existing, professional materials than to create them from scratch. Therefore, it is particularly important that the resulting wikibooks implement the highest quality standards concerning correctness, layout, and technical features (e.g. print versions, audio players embedded in web pages, interactive exercises). Otherwise the benefits of this approach are lost and companies are likely to lose their interest in this kind of collaboration. If a company is concerned that a wikibook threatens the commercial success of the company's products, it is recommendable to limit the scope but not the quality of the wikibook.

In short: Let's work together. --Martin Kraus (talk) 15:29, 13 November 2008 (UTC)

Collections
I think the "Collections" feature offers nice possibilities, for example to organize sets of lessons. The problem is that printing doesn't work well with the kind of layout that I'm using. I guess I would have to change the code specifically for the current system. And that's a problem because it is still changing. I'd rather wait until the obvious bugs are fixed, i.e., images are always printed, right-aligned images are right-aligned, tables are not spread over the full page width without reason, bold type setting works in all cases, ... --Martin Kraus (talk) 16:25, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Related Lessons
I added links between related lessons. (Sometimes the relation is not easy to see.) Feel free to add additional links (always forth and back!) but please don't remove existing links since they follow a certain scheme to make sure that all lessons are reachable. --Martin Kraus (talk) 22:09, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

No PDFs for each Lesson!
I'm actually generating PDFs for each lesson currently for the podcast I'm working on; thus, I thought about uploading these PDFs here. However, I realized that it is a lot better to print the corresponding pages from the full PDF instead of printing PDFs of specific lessons, in particular because you get consistently numbered pages if you print multiple lessons. Thus, there is no need to have a PDF for each lesson here on Wikibooks. --Martin Kraus (talk) 20:59, 30 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Oops, that changed. Since I had to generate the PDFs for the podcast anyways, I uploaded them. --Martin Kraus (talk) 19:58, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

Changes in lessons
I changed lessons A0030, A0127, A0130 because they didn't include the tables for imperative conjugation. The PDFs are not updated yet. --Martin Kraus (talk) 19:58, 3 January 2010 (UTC)

In coming days
, Thanks for all these lessons. I hope there will be more like these lessons. :)

--Learnerktm (discuss • contribs) 14:40, 11 July 2015 (UTC)