Postby tandmark » 2009-01-11, 17:40
I've played with eduFrysk for about half an hour this morning.
The coding for the site is quite good. If there are any serious glitches to be found there, I didn't stumble across them during today's session.
What's still weak is how the different files and pages get catalogued. It's not at all obvious that there's any set of beginners' videos, for example, or any effort on the part of the site owners to post a beginners' module to the site first-thing. Instead, material appears to have been added because the coding had been completed, and listed in the order in which pieces were added.
There exists a set of dictation exercises, but these don't, as far as I can see, drill the eduFrysk user on skills learned in any of the existing videos. The site really needs to create some corresponding videos that concentrate on Frisian keyboard conventions or the relationship between Frisian spelling and pronunciation. The dictation exercises are also, as I recall, rated as being rather advanced. Less advanced levels are yet to be populated by exercises.
eduFrysk uses a variation of the immersion method, which should definitely give the advantage to anyone familiar with Dutch or Afrikaans. For the rest of us, the words for the various videos and audio files have translation-on-mouseover, which usually yields the gist of the sentence when all the components get added up. I seem to recall that the Pimsleur method is also an immersion method; if that's the case, and if you like using Pimsleur products, you'll probably like using eduFrysk.
For my taste and custom, I'd say that I'd need either residence in Fryslân or some sort of textbook, or both, to learn Frisian well using eduFrysk. The site is associated with a Frisian bookstore, Afûk, so for a mere €13.50 plus shipping, I could make do with a more academic reference grammar. (I'd prefer a bilingual primer, but the only one I've heard of, Eurotalk's Talk Now Learn Frisian, isn't exactly on every bookstore shelf.)
Bottom line: If you're already living in Fryslân or otherwise studying Frisian, eduFrysk as it exists right now would be a good source of supplementary annotated practice texts and audio files. If they add some specifically beginners' material and improve the organization of their files a bit, they'll be much more useful. And since there's little other Frisian material on offer, anyone interested in learning Frisian will want to sign up for the free pilot program test of eduFrysk despite any of its current weaknesses.
Cheers,
Mark