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The boy is eating an apple

Sep 30, 2012 | 0 comments

I’m learning Spanish. I’m just beginning, but I’m quite pleased with my progress so far. A little bit each day, and this time next year, I’ll be able to ask where the bank is, order a cup of coffee with no milk, and tell people to seek independent legal advice when being offered a publishing deal with a subsidiary of a record label.

The system I’m using is called Duolingo, which has all sorts of things to recommend it. It works on written as well as spoken Spanish, it’s online, you learn at your own place, and it’s completely free.

The reason it’s free is because one of the side effects of learning the language is that you end up translating pieces of text as you go along, and those pieces of text are real world web content. The aim of the site is to use language learners to eventually translate the whole of the internet into as many major languages as possible.

It’s a really inspiring project – and well worth watching the video (above) in which they guy who invented it explains how he came up with the project.

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Music in the Global Age

Jan 19, 2012 | 1 comment

As you may have worked out by now, I’ve been working on a book that’s available for purchase as it’s being written.

I’ve already had some lovely feedback about Music in the Digital Age (and some people have already pre-ordered the audiobook). So I started to think about whether there was anything else that would make it a distinctively “digital age” product.

And then it occurred to me. It’s not just the Digital Age – it’s also the Global Age.

I’ve approached some friends who work in a range of connected fields (independent music, education, media and so on) who have as their first language something other than English. Some of them have kindly agreed to translate the book so that I can release other versions in the same way that I’m releasing the English one:

1) as a work in progress;
2) with regular updates;
3) as a pay-what-you-want download.

And so then I got ambitious, and wondered how many languages it could simultaneously be written in?

I’m aiming for 25. Twenty-six if you also count English, which is the version I’m doing. I might even be tempted to go for thirty.

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