Software/Website Title: Learning Indonesian
Website URL: http://www.learningindonesian.com/
Grade/Age Level: teenage to adult
Learning Indonesian is an online Indonesian course that provides free program and paid products. I am evaluating the free program only. The program is designed to develop conversational fluency in the Indonesian language and it is intended for those who are casually interested to learn some basic Indonesian vocabularies and conversational skills.
The content of the website is actually not about the course. It mainly introduce and explain about both free and paid programs. Clearly, the explanations are intended for promoting paid program, which is called Learning Indonesian Premium. The website has blogs about Indonesian language, food, and travel created by Cici and Shaun who are also the instructors of the course. Cici posted stories in Indonesian, but Shaun posted his in English. Some people interested with the stories commented in Indonesian, some in English, and some other in mixed English-Indonesian. Cici and Shaun replied to the comments in Indonesian and provided the English version of their replies.
The course is presented in 48-session-audio lessons with additional two lessons from the paid program. All lessons are in MP3 files. The lessons are designed in graded level of difficulty of pronouncing Indonesian vocabularies, phrases, and sentences commonly used in everyday conversation. Each lesson is designed based on the previous ones. The lessons are actually listen and repeat exercises. Cici and Shaun articulate the instruction,examples, and short explanation, while learners have to repeat the examples. Lessons 1 - 48 contain English based instruction. There will be pause after an example to give learners time to repeat the example. The lessons of the free program are actually the shorter versions edited out of the paid products.
The main external documents are: Important steps for new users, About us, Full program, Cici and Shaun's blogs, and Learning and community. These documents are effectively used to introduce and briefly explain both the free and paid programs. Other additional guides includes those for getting free study guides, member Log In, content news update, important pages and subscribe to Podcast. The "important pages" provides links to free audio lessons and recommended books.
Cici and Shaun introduce themselves and great their target audience briefly and warmly. They also provide simple explanation and provide sample lessons. In addition, the fact that Shaun is a native speaker of English and Cici is a native speaker of Indonesian has made the instruction, explanation, and examples clear and easy to understand. In my opinion, all those factors will make people visiting this website want to know more and download the audio lesson. Those who try the free versions and have particular plans related to Indonesia will also be interested in buying the Premium products for more practices.
This audio lessons would be useful for teenage or adult learners who speak or know English and want to learn basic Indonesian conversational skills. Particularly, the lessons are useful for those who plan to travel to Indonesia and need to know how to communicate with Indonesians at some tourists destinations because not many Indonesians speak English well.
The website provides practice through the audio lessons, that is to repeat the examples of words, phrases, or sentences. There is no assessment and feedback. I think this is because the lessons are designed for casually interested learners. However, the website is easy to use. It is easy to navigate to different parts and it is also easy to download all free lessons available.
Because this website is intended for listening and speaking practice, the strength of the programs is in the clarity of the instruction, simple explanation, clear pronunciation of each example. However, this website would be more interesting if Cici and Shaun provide speaking practice for the users. This can be done by making use of Skype.
5 comments:
I like the idea of a website for language learning the relies on MP3 files for most of the instruction. The one that I reviewed was almost entirely written (except for a small section on pronunciation) and I can see where that would turn a lot of people off. Besides the obvious fact that if you're teaching a language with a script that many people don't know, doing it in written form is going to be so much tougher.
I took a look at this website and thought it was a good resource. I have some interest in learning Indonesian so I listened to a few of the lessons. Like Catherine mentioned, using mp3's is a great way to help learners and I felt that the production was good quality.
Catherine and Michael,
Thanks for the comments. The audio lessons are good and not boring. However, if I were using them to learn Indonesian, a language that I don't know for example, I would need some scripts of the examples of Indonesian phrases and sentences. I could not find them in the free program. Maybe they are available in the paid program.
Well, for me an ideal website or software is the one that facilitates our four language skills, reading, writing, listening and speaking. In addition, it is also adaptive to the learner's needs. Hmm, that's one of my dream, to be able to design such software :P
Michael, if you need an Indonesian native speaker to practice, I'll be glad to help you :P
Retno
I thought it was interesting that comments are in Indonesian, English, and Indonesian-English. Is the Indonesian-English like code-switching or is it like English but into Indonesian pronunciation (like 'yogurt' in Japanese is 'yo-guruto')? If it's code-switching, in your opinion, is it good for Indonesian learners to be exposed to this? Might it encourage them to put into English that parts they are unsure of in Indonesian instead of 'forcing' them to use only the target language?
Thanks for introducing this resource Retno. Since I'm planning to visit Indonesia sometime this year or the next, I'll definitely use this for future reference. Whenever I visit a new country, I try to learn the basic greetings, numbers, and other expressions. I do like the audio format, but since I'm more of a visual learner, I would have to supplement this site with other written resources.
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