From: johan@vanrooyen.fsbusiness.co.uk
Subject: Mail from Johan van Rooyen
Date: November 15, 2004 10:56:42 PM CET
Cc: johan@vanrooyen.fsbusiness.co.uk
Johan van Rooyen [1] sent this email to you through iPodder.org [2] regarding this page [3].
I really love the work you're doing and I don't just mean the technical and artistic stuff but also the huge effort you're putting into promoting this podcasting baby of yours and Dave Winer's - it's clearly becoming a very healthy toddler!
Anyway, I taught English in Spain for seven years and learned Spanish in the process. Also I was six years old when I started learning English and along the way I also studied Latin and German - my mother tongue is Afrikaans - baby Dutch, as you know! My wife speaks Basque, Spanish, French and English ? I only mention this because when we met we had no language in common so I ended up teaching her all her basic English ? she was my first ever pupil.
So a few years ago I was really keen on doing an unconventional audio-based Spanish course (in the sense of not blindly following standard pedagogic models and theories of language learning) for people thinking of living and/or working in Spain or other Spanish speaking countries. I wasn?t very hopeful that the established language learning publishers would be very interested so eventually I dropped the idea... until podcasting came along, of course!
I have now finally managed to buy a mike, buy a mixer, discovered what a bloody difficult art voice recording is - hats off to the likes of you (the Elitist) and Dave Slusher (the Smoothie) - and recorded my first pod-lesson called, How to Really Learn Spanish - Podcast 1. It?s available for the ipodder at:
http://www.streamload.com/Johan0808/ReallyLearnSpanish/rss.xml
I did the feed by hand and though it works on the ipodder (for Windows) ? I checked - I pinged audio.weblogs.com without any result so far so I guess it needs some more work.
Anyway I would be very grateful if you could arrange for it to appear in the ipodder directory. May I suggest a category ? ?Language Learning? (subdirectory: ?Spanish?) ? to distinguish it from ?Languages? which is currently used for non-English medium podcasts ? mine is in English. Also, it?s only 8:07 long so you might want to give it a listen. It is, as far as I can tell, a novel way of making use of this new medium (boing!) you might even want to consider mentioning it on the Daily Source Code.
Hope the move goes well and welcome to England - another very weird country!
[1] http://public.xdi.org/=Johan
[2] http://www.ipodder.org/
[3] http://www.ipodder.org/
