Awesome Free Language Lessons!

Yesterday I posted a cute video on the pronunciation of ö in German. Finds out that the video is part of a series created by The Language Resource Centre at Newcastle University. The program is designed to tailor to (young) people through multimedia which can be accessed on the go (Ipods, Iphones, smart phones, etc). Most importantly though, the materials are completely free!

You can find all the German videos here. I have linked to a few below. They also have separate lessons specifically concerning pronunciation, grammar, and specific phrases! They even have an RSS feed! If German isn't your thing there are lessons in Chinese, English, French, Spanish and Swahili! For the low price of nothing, how can you go wrong? Especially when compared to the price of Rosetta Stone, or even Muzzy.

The amount of resources on the site is fantastic. There is a teacher's toolkit complete with lesson plans, as well as content submitted by students (click one of the dates at the top of the page).The content of the videos is also diverse. The German videos for example cover all the cases individually. For most of the languages, the Language Resource Centre has over one-hundred videos.

Each of the short videos revolve around The Angry Family, a cast of bizarre cartoon characters. I am reluctant to admit it, but I don't think I would like these videos as much if they were not weird!

Point made? Anyways I really suggest watching a couple of these each day. Keep up the awesome work at Newcastle University!

Muzzy

Watching TV as a child in the U.S. , you were guaranteed to see this ad five thousand times in a row:

"Yes that's French these children are speaking, and no these children are not French, they're American." To this day I have no idea what that little girl is saying in French; but a part of me still hopes she is either wrong, or saying something really offensive in nature.


The commercials is right when it says that these cartoons were made by the BBC, but incidentally they were made to teach ESL (English as a second language) and then later the rights were bought by Early Advantage, the company you are sending your money to in the commercial. Incidentally they are still hawking the product  and it looks like they also market it to librarians. If you interested, you might be able to get some of these programs from you local library.  

I never knew anyone who had Muzzy. The product was marketed to a niche group of parents; those that wanted their children to learn another language, but were gullible enough to pay six easy payments of $28.08. Today the DVD sets will still cost you around one hundred dollars on Amazon, but you can get the VHS sets for around 20 bucks. Unfortunately it looks like you will have to pay over one hundred dollars for the German VHS set. There are torrents available online,  but it seems that some might be missing parts: certain videos, or workbooks. Still, thanks to the resources of the Internet, we can watch Muzzy right now!

From the commercials my impression always was that the cartoon was like Sesame Street, simply in another language. There actually seems to be a story line thought, with a royal family who has a princess. There is a guy who is in love with her, but there is also an evil green guy who is in love with her too. Muzzy is an alien that orbits around their little kingdom in his spaceship and hangs out with the other characters to practice their nouns, which is a pretty cool thing for a space alien to do. I can only imagine the role he plays later on.

I am interested to know if there in anyone who watched this as a child? How often did you watch it, did you like it or did your parents make you watch it? Was it helpful or educational to you in any way?