Welcome to the Effortless Language Acquisition Podcast.

Today's episode is titled Community.

During a recent conversation with Umberto and Tony,

we discussed the potential of learner-created content.

Each of us expressed our frustrations with the difficulty of finding authentic and interesting conversational

materials that include both audio and text.

As we chatted, I mentioned my desire to record unscripted conversations between my friends

and then transcribe them.

Such unplanned conversations are always much different

than the carefully scripted interactions presented in textbooks.

Natural conversations are also quite different from audio books or audio articles.

Next, Umberto mentioned recording short unscripted conversations between he and his wife in Spanish and then posting them to his blog.

As members of a language learning community, we would then support each other's learning efforts.

I'd supply English content in audio and text form for use by community members who want to learn English.

And Umberto would do the same for members who want to learn Spanish.

The linguist community also has a large number of Japanese speakers.

Tony is currently learning Japanese, so he wants to encourage these students to add Japanese

podcasts with texts to their blogs, which within serve as learning

resources for him.

Since Tony is a native Chinese speaker, he could return the favor with Mandarin content.

With a large enough and active enough community,

there would be absolutely no need for commercial materials of any kind.

...