André Klein's Blog, page 27
August 15, 2012
An Alternative to Smashwords And The Horrors Of The MeatGrinder
If you write and publish ebooks in English these days while not being a US-citizen, there are many hoops to jump through. Many authors have been discouraged by the stories alone and stopped the journey before they even started.
Payment and tax issues aside, a big problem is that it’s very difficult to get your ebooks listed on several stores such as Barnes & Noble or iBooks if you’re not an American.
As far as I know there are currently two major marketplaces that allow you to upload your book directly, independent of your country of origin: One is of course Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform, and the other one is Kobo’s Writing Life.
But you don’t need to sign up for a Green Card just yet, there’s still an alternative!
Smashin’ Words Like It’s 1992I stumbled over Smashwords a few years ago before. And to be honest, I navigated just as quickly away from it as I found it. The design seemed stuck in the early 90ies and although I saw truckloads of new books being uploaded, the site somehow felt cluttered and deserted.
It was only last year that I found out that Smashwords offered a very crucial component for people like me: free distribution to US-stores (well, almost free, they take a small commission). The complete list of their distribution channels is impressive. They get your book onto Sony, B&N, Kobo, Amazon, Apple, Diesel, Page Foundry, Baker-Taylor’s, Blio, Library Direct, Axis 360
Thus, not wanting to put all my eggs in one basket (Amazon), I decided to ignore Smashword’s webdesign and created an account. How difficult could it possibly be to upload my books? After all, they were already completely finished – their final edits painstakingly optimized for ereading devices.
A Quick Note On The Anatomy Of EbooksWhat I’ve discovered in my years of working with documents is that standards compliant documents convert to other standards compliant formats. - Steven Saus
What is an ebook anyway? It’s not that simple a question, actually. There are some people who sell PDFs as ebooks and then there are hundreds of different ereader specific e-book formats.
The good news: two of the most popular e-book formats, MOBI and EPUB are basically just HTML documents (just like the page you are reading right now).
In the beginning, I wrote and formatted my books in Open Office, exported them as PDF and tried to upload to Amazon. The result: a mess!
This is why, whenever I create a book now, I edit it through an HTML editor and pay special attention that my code is valid, just like when working on a webpage.
The simpler the underlying HTML, the easier it is to convert my book to MOBI and EPUB.
The Horrors Of Meatgrinder and AutovetterI fought with the Meatgrinder until my eyes bugged. My fonts were many and their name was Legion - Meb Bryant
As great as Smashwords’ distribution channels may be, its processing is infamously horrible. And it all hinges on the simple fact that they want their uploads in Microsoft .DOC format!
In terms of structure, EPUB and HTML are close twins while DOC couldn’t be further from any ebook format.
Smashwords wants to make it easy for people with no coding experience to just upload their book straight from their Office Suite.
But oh, the horrors!
Instead of allowing me to just upload my finished EPUB or MOBI I’m forced to stuff it all into a DOC format and watch Smashwords Meatgrinder wreak utter havoc while trying to convert it into …yes… EPUB and MOBI.
Assuming the nagging Autovetter doesn’t find any problems with the uploaded file, just wait one or two weeks for the file to be reviewed by Smashwords in detail and there’ll be a long list of vague errors (aka reasons why the book can’t go live).
It has taken me months to push through various books this way that were already compliant and valid e-book files ! And the sad truth is that many of these publications only survived the Meatgrinder when stripped of most of their formatting.
Again, the sole reason for putting up with this deranged process in the first place is because Smashwords is the only way to get my publications into US-only channels. But maybe it isn’t…
An Alternative to Smashwords?Yesterday I stumbled over an interesting service called booktango.
They seem to be a doing something very similar to Smashwords (distribution channels include Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Books on Board, Google, Kobo, Scribd, Sony) with a few exceptions:
they don’t take a commission for themselves (business model is built on offering services such as cover design)their website is simple and straightforwardyou can upload your EPUB directly!you can edit and correct your book in an online editorthe automatic check shows errors directly in the textYesterday I gave it a quick try and it feels very refreshing. Since I already have a number of books on Smashwords, though, I’m not sure whether to change horses in midstream.
Struggling with Smashwords’ Meatgrinder is like wrangling a herd of lobotimized mustangs and when it finally works there’s this sense of (admittedly low-key) achievement.
But even if I continue the good fight with the MeatGrinder, it’s good to know there’s finally an alternative for us non-Americans.
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
August 10, 2012
10 Fun Facts About The English Alphabet
To celebrate the release of our new Hebrew Alphabet workbook we decided to dig out 10 fun facts about the English alphabet for you to impress your friends, teachers and colleagues.
Here we go:
1.The English word alphabet comes (via Latin) from the names of the first two letters of the Greek alphabet: alpha and beta. These Greek words, however, are derivations of the Phoenician aleph and bet, which go back further than 1050 BC.
2.The most commonly used letter in English is E
3.The 26 letters of the English alphabet make up more than 40 distinct sounds. Since there are a lot more sounds than letters, many letters have different pronunciations,e.g. the C in cool sounds different than the C in city
4.The dot over the letter “i” is called title.
5.The least commonly used letter in English is Z
6.Each letter has both a majuscule (major) and a minuscule (minor) version. Many modern conventions such as clear capital letters and spaces between words date back to a system of writing called Carolingian minuscule from around the 10th century
7.About 100 languages use the same alphabet like in English which makes it one of the most widely used alphabets in the world. While some languages have a few more and others a few less, they all share the 23 core letters originally found in the Roman alphabet.
8.The most common word in English is THE
9.The longest word in English which doesn’t use the letter E is floccinaucinihilipilification
10.A sentence which contains all 26 letters of the English alphabet is called a pangram. A famous pangram is: “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” but there are even shorter ones such as: “Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.”
Have a nice weekend!
P.S.: If you liked this post, please share it with your friends
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clipart: clker.com
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
August 6, 2012
What Makes Studying So Difficult?
To many of us, learning something new, from programming a webpage or speaking a new language is a chore. Yes, there are these little sparks of achievement. But more often than not, the process of learning is a strenuous path of pain and frustration.
We don’t like to admit it. But let’s be honest for a second.
How many things you learned in school or college were wildly fascinating and how many were drenched in blood, sweat and tears?
Most people will answer that for each topic they found interesting and even enjoyed studying, there are three to five others they hated!
This is nothing new.
We’re quick to rationalize and say: “That’s life. Some things you just have to do, whether you like it or not.”
But what’s the ratio here?
Is life 80% must and 20% want?
It’s not that easy, obviously, because we train ourselves to want what we must.
Let me explain…
Doing What We Want vs. Wanting What We WantIn order to reach a goal, e.g. being a doctor and helping people, you’ll have to go through the inconvenient business of cutting up cadavers and filling your head with heavy vocabulary and procedures – not exactly everyone’s cup of tea.
If your willpower and motivation are strong enough, you’ll chew stones, but are you going to enjoy your studies by sheer brute force?
The imperative of “willpower” seems overrated. According to hard-core proponents of the “if you want, you can do anything” philosophy, the world must be full of powerless schmucks. People just have to want and off they go. Right?
Wrong.
It all starts with interest.
Everyone has something they’re interested in, whether it’s the complexities of planetary climate, collectible action figures or dazzling graffiti. It doesn’t have to be something fancy or useful. If it’s really interesting to you, it’s more than useful!
Why?
Personal interests are the root of an interest-driven approach to learning. Obvious, isn’t it?
Going through things you hate in order to reach a goal makes learning a means to an end.
Being deeply interested in something and soaking up everything you can find about it makes learning an end in itself, which makes the learning both more effective and enjoyable!
A large part of our (educational) world still works on the principle of “no pain, no game” but that doesn’t mean we have to dance to its piping.
The Transformative Power Of Keen Interests
In my personal life people always told me I should do this or that because it will give me money, security, etc. And it actually took me more than ten years to disregard these well-meaning but ultimately misleading advice and instead commit myself fully to my own interests (i.e. language [learning], design and technology).
To describe the payoff of such a commitment in very short way: it’s a kind of satisfaction no money can buy. And it enabled me to make a living from what I love.
This principle of interest-driven learning is also at the heart of my experimental publications for German learners. I’m not in the business of creating text book after text book that will torture people with tables of rules and irregularities.
Instead, I try to stir people’s interest in the language by letting them experience it. Whether that always works, I don’t know, hence the “experimental” part, but according to the feedback I receive people are really grateful to leave their dry training plans and dive right into the language itself.
One of my recent projects which I’m very excited about is a detective story for German learners, actually, it’s already the second part in a series that will probably grow even more in the future.
In a few days I’ll give away the first chapter for free to everyone on our German ebooks newsletter. If you are interested you can sign up for it for free, find out more here, watch the trailer video below, or if you have friends who are struggling with the mother-tongue of Brecht and Einstein, send them a link and my best regards.
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photo above:
Some rights reserved by thekellyscope
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
August 4, 2012
How To Patch The Summer Hole
It’s that time of the year again when everyone’s on holiday, chilling out in pools and seaside resorts. Many politicians and sports institutions are on holiday and the newspapers and TV stations are struggling to find newsworthy material, so they run inanities.
In English this season is called “The Silly season”, the Germans call it “Sommerloch” (summer hole), in Hebrew and many other language it’s called the “cucumber season” and the existentialist French go so far as to dub it ”la morte-saison” (the dead season).
Historically, this is the worst time of the year for newspapers, marking the lowest readership.
The Cucumber Season is a direct result of the old paradigm of impersonal mass-media.
But in an age where everyone tweets and manages his own personal Newsfeed, is the summer hole still relevant?
Does the world stop dead in its tracks because politicians take a vacation?
From Newsrooms to The BeachIn the year 2012 news creation and news consumption is location-independent.
In other words: you can blog from the beach or read your friends’ tweets on a wi-fi enabled airplane.
These may not be the kind of news that a newspaper will, but they might be more relevant to you, personally.
Admittedly, this year the dead season isn’t felt as much because of the London Olympics, but the fact remains that a great deal of the news we consume today is social and personal.
What about Us?We’re busy as usual creating new books and language learning materials and just days away from announcing something very special for both Hebrew and German learners. To make it even more interesting we will send out the news only to people who personally subscribed to either our German or Hebrew ebooks newsletter.
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img: CC by bjakeb
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 31, 2012
Traditional Publishing Vs. Self Published Authors On The NYT Bestseller List
Smashword’s Mark Coker just announced on his blog yesterday that 7 of the books on the New York Times best seller list were written and published without the help of publishing houses.
Yes, they are “self-published”. And that’s not even counting the top three occupied by the Fifty Shades trilogy which started out as self-published fan fiction.
It’s a wake up call for readers, writers and publishers everywhere.
The New York Times bestseller list is like the Billboard charts. It’s seen like the litmus test of English literature. Make it there, and you’re legit. In the past only traditionally published authors could be found on it. And it throws up an important question:
What does it mean for publishing houses if self-published authors can reach this sweet spot without their help?
Publishing houses worldwide are struggling for survival, but when asked in interviews about their impending obsolescence they always answer nebulously that they’re still relevant because they “guide, supervise and care for” their authors.
And yes, they will take care of editing and providing a cover. But if we look at the crucial aspect of marketing, publishing houses often can’t afford to equally market and advertise each of their publications.
Just like the music industry, the publishing industry is built on stardom. Big names mean less risks, higher probability of sales. Therefore, upcoming authors will often not receive the same care and marketing although they’re under the same publishing house.
But even for the big names, 96% of publishers in Germany for example say that “their authors should manage their own website and marketing” and three quarters of authors admitted that if they had success they did some or all marketing themselves.
Another example is the “ebook millionaire” Amanda Hocking who went from self-publishing to traditional publishing. In a recent interview she mentioned that while she was a self-publisher she was doing 50% writing, 50% marketing. After switching to a publishing house she said it shifted to 70% writing and 30% marketing.
The main point here is not that she shifted 20% of her time towards writing, but that she is still using a significant amount of her time to market her books.
Maybe it’s time to stop looking at traditional publishing as the “golden path” and self-publishing as the sneaky back-alley.
The New York Times bestseller list already shows that readers couldn’t care less how a book is published, as long as it’s a page-turner.
And maybe Coker is right when he says:
There was a lot of stigma associated with self-publishing four years ago and very little stigma associated with traditional publishing. I think over next few years we’re going to see that reverse.
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About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 29, 2012
Why Blogs Can Make Great Books (Writing In the 21st Century)
Who’s still blogging in the age of Social Media? In the info-storm of tweeting, instagramming our food and facebooking our pets is there time or even a need for blogs?
The answer of course is an absolute unequivocal YES. Blogs are even more powerful than they were 10 years ago, and contrary to what some people believe Social Media hasn’t replaced blogs but made them even stronger!
Today I want to show you one more reason why blogs are relevant: they can be a stepping stone to writing books.
Blogs And Books: Partners In CrimeWhen I’m talking about blogs here I’m not referring to micro-blogging popularized by Twitter or image-blogging made infamous by Tumblr. Instead, I’m talking about blogs as a pure text medium (if there are pics and links, great, but that’s secondary). Because when you strip away all the bells and whistles, themes, widgets and what-nots, the nature of a blog isn’t all that bewildering: it’s simply text, alright.
And you know what?
Writing blog posts is hard. For an average length blog post (ca. 500 words) you actually need to sit down and focus. There’s no way around it.
But you know what’s even harder than writing blog posts?
Writing books. They’re (typically) longer than 500 words, which means you have to focus even harder.
Effort Vs. Immediate GratificationHow many people do you know personally that use Facebook or Twitter daily?
20? 30? 50? even more?
How many people do you know that are blogging seriously?
2? 5? 10?
How many people do you know that are writing books?
1? 2? 0?
The addictive thing about Social Media is immediate gratification. You post something and get immediate replies. Writing books is a very lonely business, on the other hand. You don’t get to receive immediate feedback and praise for each sentence you produce.
Blogs, however, are somewhere in the middle. The writing process is very private. In these thirty or ninety minutes you are working on your blog posts you’re “disconnected” from the feedback loop of Social Media. But once you’re done you get to share your articles and receive direct feedback.
This is why blogging can be a serious stepping-stone towards making books in the 21st century.
And I’m not just talking about privately printed editions you give to friends and family but actual books that will land in stores worldwide and have the potential to become bestsellers. I’ve done this two times already with great success (see here and here).
8 Steps From Blog To BookThe below process works best (in my experience) if you’re writing non-fiction, but I’m ready to be proven wrong.
1. Write a blog post every second or third day. Each one should have its own beginning, middle and ending.
2. Once you got a lot of blog posts about one or more connected topics, start earmarking your favorites.
3. List the articles you want to become part of your book and gently group them into related chapters.
4. Copy and paste all your articles into an empty document.
5. Start re-reading, editing, adding/removing paragraphs and connecting “chapters”
6. When you’re done add an introduction, a bibliography with links to other resources, etc.
7. Come up with a title for your book, create a cover or let someone do it for you
8. Use a software like Calibre to convert your final book to ebook format and upload it to marketplaces worldwide.
Any questions? Leave a comment and I’ll try to answer it.
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About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 25, 2012
Ninety-Nine Cents For Your Thoughts
When I was 11 years old I lived in a small town. We spent most of our time outdoors or riding around aimlessly with our bicycles. Another popular activity was to go deal-hunting in the two $0.99 cent stores on main street.
Equipped with our modest allowances and an insatiable curiosity we hunted these stores for novelty products, always surprised by what $0.99 cents could buy. There were soap dispensers in the shape of cow udders, mobile battery-powered mini fans and a lot of cheap tools that would break after using them once or twice.
Needless to say, these stores were far from glamour and our fascination with them was frowned upon. Their dusty shelves were carelessly crammed with crates overflowing with cheap trinkets (ordered in a way no mortal could fathom) and the names of these stores weren’t even making an effort to conceal that.
Buying Ebooks or Songs is Like Popping PeanutsCut to the year 2012. The $0.99 deal is back with some shiny new clothes.
Whether it’s songs on iTunes or ebooks Amazon, the $0.99 cent model revolutionized the way we think about online purchases. If buying a car is a drawn-out process of carefully deliberating pros and cons, purchasing ebooks or songs is like popping peanuts, the pain of parting with our hard-earned cash made invisible in the immediate gratification of one-click-checkouts and zero shipping time.
Lately, I’ve seen this trend even applied to online language learning lessons, where English teachers sell a seat in their course for a dollar.
Pride And Prejudice In Micro-Economies“An English lesson for $0.99? That can’t be good, can it?”
“Selling a book for $0.99? The author must have low self-confidence.”
“A song for $0.99? But that destroys record stores”
As much as people like to complain about the alleged devaluation that comes with the $0.99 model, their opinions are based on a comparison of the old world where a book, song, lesson entailed a whole galaxy of contextual costs including but not limited to production and distribution.
To make an ebook, not a single drop of ink has to be spilled. To hold an online class, no rent or maintenance bill has to be paid.
By lowering prices, content creators aren’t losing value. They are, in fact, adding to it because not only are they winning customers who wouldn’t look at their class or book if it came at a premium price, they also get to create a taste for more!
The new publishing model is not about quick sales (although that can happen, too). It’s all about creating a platform, a community of people who trust you and won’t just be willing to purchase more premium goods but will even recommend you to their friends.
It’s like a theme-park. The most important part is to get people inside your world.
Why not lower the bar at the entrance booth?
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 20, 2012
How To Teach Online: 5 Tips For Beginners (Video)
Many people around the world are toying with the idea of becoming online teachers, either by offering private language lessons or holding webinars and classes. It can be an interesting (and ethical) path to make a living while working from home.
But for beginners, the amount of information can be overwhelming.
What should you do if you want to teach online? What teaching tools should you use? In short: How to teach online?
Yesterday, my friends and colleagues Kirsten Winkler, Benjamin Stewart, myself, and some others got together in a Google Hangout to discuss these issues and offer a few broad pointers for people who want to teach on the Internet.
At first, Benjamin asked Kirsten and me some great questions about our own experiences and practices in online teaching. Later, George Machlan and James Ashenhurst joined the conversation and shared some points about how they teach online.
You can watch the whole conversation here (about one hour) or consume it in bite-sized bits which Benjamin kindly prepared:
1. What Platforms Do You Use To Teach online?What’s the best way to teach online? Platforms or private?
2. How Should Online Teachers Get Started?If you’re just getting started, this will give you some ideas.
3. Is Moodle A Good Platform To Teach Online?Moodle: a 21st century teaching tool or academic mess?
4. Do You Need Your Own Domain To Teach Online?Find out why it can be worthwhile to stake out your own ground.
5. How Can Online Teachers Find Potential Students?There’s no teacher without students. Here are some ideas how to attract them.
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 15, 2012
How To Prepare, Make And Sell Digital Learning Materials
As an online teacher there comes a point when finding new students isn’t the problem anymore. You’ve been struggling to promote, advertise your services and suddenly there are more lesson requests and students than you can deal with.
There are generally two things you can do at that point:
1. Rise your rates and teach fewer students
2. Develop asynchronous modes of teaching
The first point is rather simple in principle, but there’ll be limits to how much you can charge per lesson. Very few people will be willing to pay for lessons rated at $300 per hour, unless of course you’re a celebrity tutor from Shanghai, which I assume you’re not.
About the second…
Asynchro-What?Asynchronous teaching means that you and the student don’t have to be present at the same time. This has a variety of different benefits:
you can teach and help many more people at the same timewhile students are learning from you, you can do something elseSounds nice, doesn’t it? And no, you don’t have to clone yourself or dabble in Voodoo.
Instead, you can use digital media to carry your experience and knowledge far, wide and fast.
What kind of media? Here are just two examples:
Become a YouTube TeacherThere are many people who do this, but my friends Kirsten Winkler and Fluency MC do it especially well.
The idea here is to create short educational videos, gather subscribers and feed them new content on a regular basis. If you come up with unique ways to present the material and the traffic spikes, you’ll be offered to become a YouTube partner. This means that you can activate advertisements on your videos and – if your channel is going strong – this can become a solid source of income.
Don’t expect to see any magical growth from today to tomorrow, though. It takes a lot of work and patience. See Kirsten’s article here for more details. But even if you don’t make enough from the ads, you can still benefit from the audience that you gathered, by pointing them to other materials you created.
Become a PublisherLast year, when I started noticing that while lesson requests were rapidly increasing, my time and head-space were dwindling away, I started experimenting with creating learning materials in various ways, shapes and forms.
Until now, it has almost completely replaced my live teaching activities.
If you want to try something similar, here are a few pointers.
1. Get an Idea
Sounds corny? Well, you need to come up with something, be it an audiobook about irregular verbs, a comic about Kanji or a survival book for the Oktoberfest. For me, taking long walks and doing the dishes are great idea generators.
Some people will tell you to first check if there’s a “need on the market”, but I think it’s much more important to find something that you have fun doing, because it affects the quality of the final product like nothing else.
2. Find a Method and Apply It
Take some time to find the right software or tools to do the job. If you want to create an ebook, you might want to start by using Open Office to write and compose the book and then go to Calibre for converting it to ebook format. If you want to create an audiobook, get a decent microphone and download Audacity.
3. Wrap it and Publish it
Once your learning materials are done, you need to find ways to bring them to the public.
Sure, you could just offer them as free downloads from your website, and while that’s always a great idea to promote something, you obviously need to start selling, too.
There are many ways to sell your finished learning materials.
Here are just two:
Setting Up Shop1. From Your Own Website
See this link for detailed instructions
2. Go to Open Marketplaces
If you want to get an ebook out to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc. without wanting to mess much with file conversions, you will love Smashwords. It takes a bit of time for them to approve and deliver your creation, but at least you can just upload a .DOC file, set your price and they will do the rest.
The other solutions is to create publishing accounts with these marketplaces directly. For Amazon, that’s kdp.amazon.com, for Barnes & Noble that’s pubit.barnesandnoble.com.
While this process is a bit more complicated, it’s also more professional and faster. Keep in mind though, that both Smashwords and marketplaces will take commissions for each sale. You might be able to sell your product from your website without paying commission, but also you won’t get the same exposure like on a marketplace.
Any questions? Leave a comment and I’ll try to answer it.
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thumbnail: Some rights reserved by aldoaldoz
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
July 10, 2012
Who Said That Language Learning Shouldn’t Be Fun?
When I look at successful online teachers or edupreneurs, how they choose and present their materials, I see a distinct pattern. Whether it’s Jason R. Levine aka Fluency MC who teaches irregular verbs by rapping them in a Beastie Boysian flow, George Machlan who transforms English learning into a celebration through his Karaoke English sessions, Sylvia Guinan’s brainfriendly approach or Nina Hanáková who turned “English without books” into a trademark, they all have one thing in common.
Already guessed it? No?
The Bludgeon Of StructureTraditionally, languages were (and are still) taught with a strong emphasis on structure and learning by rote. I don’t have to explain to you how that works because you probably experienced it yourself.
It’s not that structure in general is bad, but that an over-emphasis on linear approaches to language learning over many decades has created a strong need for alternative approaches.
Online teachers and edupreneurs thriving today are all addressing this need and reaping the benefits.
Again, not clubbing people over the head with grammar rule books doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t aware of the importance of these rules and haven’t studied them in detail.
It does mean, however, that by not caging learners into a “structural edifice” from day one, learners can develop more dynamically, individually and most importantly: having more fun!
The Stigma Of FunExperiencing positive emotions while studying improves memorizing and processing. Merrill Swain states that
if the learners are anxious and experiencing negative emotions they will understand less or have a high affective filter but if their emotions are positive and relaxed, they will have a low affective filter and be able to understand and process more.
I don’t know about you, but I didn’t exactly feel reassured, positive or relaxed when my Latin teacher first dropped four double sheets of densely printed declension and conjugation rules on my table with the words: “Learn until tomorrow!”
Some people say “no pain, no game” – and yes, making an effort is important, but does it have to be a torture? Who said that language learning can’t and shouldn’t be fun?
Textbooks For The 21st CenturyLast year we started experimenting here at learnoutlive with publishing ebooks that address these needs for a more painless and simply enjoyable way of language learning. And what we’ve found is that there’s not only a huge demand for these, it’s as if this approach works especially well on e-readers and tablet devices. We work a lot with images and audio, so strictly speaking they aren’t textbooks, at all.
If you’re curious about it, today we released a new publication for Hebrew learners, and – as always- you can grab a free copy for 24 hours, no strings attached. Simply click on one the links below:
available on Amazon UK – Amazon US – Amazon DE – Amazon IT – Amazon FR – Amazon ES
And remember: Have some fun!
Or as my colleague Jason puts it: “Relax, repeat, remember”
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thumbnail donkey photo: CC by jaxxon
About the author:
André Klein was born in Germany, has grown up and lived in many different places including Thailand, Sweden and Israel. He has produced two music albums, performed and organized literary readings, curated an experimental television program and is the author of various short stories and non-fiction works.
